notioncollective
Cadet
- Joined
- Mar 9, 2015
- Messages
- 6
There has been a lot of discussion around the web about how Mac OS X clients running Mavericks (10.9) and Yosemite (10.10) have client-side performance issues when connecting to SMB shares being served by various server platforms, including FreeNAS. For example, here <https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/write-access-to-cifs-share-by-mac-kills-smb.27474/>.
I had no such performance problems connecting from a Mavericks or Yosemite client to our FreeNAS v9.1.1 as recently as yesterday, and was able to copy a 6GB file from the SMB share in about 1 minute (appx. 100MB/s). This was consistent with what I expected from SMB2. However this morning I upgraded our FreeNAS to the latest 9.3 STABLE and now transfer rates oscillate between 10 and 25MB/s. Nothing changed on the client!
I have tried every combination of SMB max server protocol setting in the FreeNAS Web GUI, specifying the SMB:// vs CIFS:// protocol on Mac, modifying /etc/nsmb.conf and setting "sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0" on the Mac. None of these tweaks have improved my transfer rates. Local disk transfer tests within the FreeNAS OS give me much better performance, and I can confirm the em1 link is at 1Gbps.
I guess my question is, what could have changed on the FreeNAS between 9.1.1 and 9.3 to cause this loss of performance? Any tuning suggestions? I'd hate to revert to 9.1.1 just to resolve this issue.
Server Specs:
10GB RAM
2 cores of 4-core Xeon Host (Dell T110)
Virtualbox VM connecting to USB3 external storage RAID via RAWDISK vmdk
(I'm sure people will have many opinions about running FreeNAS in a VM in this configuration, but it has served me well and, like I said, the performance was fine until the 9.3 upgrade)
One final detail: I can watch the transfer performance oscillate up and down almost rhythmically on the Mac client, which suggests a 'flow control' problem.
I had no such performance problems connecting from a Mavericks or Yosemite client to our FreeNAS v9.1.1 as recently as yesterday, and was able to copy a 6GB file from the SMB share in about 1 minute (appx. 100MB/s). This was consistent with what I expected from SMB2. However this morning I upgraded our FreeNAS to the latest 9.3 STABLE and now transfer rates oscillate between 10 and 25MB/s. Nothing changed on the client!
I have tried every combination of SMB max server protocol setting in the FreeNAS Web GUI, specifying the SMB:// vs CIFS:// protocol on Mac, modifying /etc/nsmb.conf and setting "sysctl -w net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0" on the Mac. None of these tweaks have improved my transfer rates. Local disk transfer tests within the FreeNAS OS give me much better performance, and I can confirm the em1 link is at 1Gbps.
I guess my question is, what could have changed on the FreeNAS between 9.1.1 and 9.3 to cause this loss of performance? Any tuning suggestions? I'd hate to revert to 9.1.1 just to resolve this issue.
Server Specs:
10GB RAM
2 cores of 4-core Xeon Host (Dell T110)
Virtualbox VM connecting to USB3 external storage RAID via RAWDISK vmdk
(I'm sure people will have many opinions about running FreeNAS in a VM in this configuration, but it has served me well and, like I said, the performance was fine until the 9.3 upgrade)
One final detail: I can watch the transfer performance oscillate up and down almost rhythmically on the Mac client, which suggests a 'flow control' problem.