Transfer speed query

[Flinty]

Greetings,

I'm wondering about my transfer speeds.

I have 2x3tb WD Greens in a ZFS mirror.

LAN speed test - shows read and write speeds of 190Mbps, between the freenas box (HP N54l) and the windows pc with the dataset mounted as a drive (win 7 ultimate).

However, actual transfer speed is maxing out at around 8Mbps.

Any advice would be appreciated.

Cheers.

 

[gpsguy]

How much RAM do you have in your N54L? Hopefully you yanked the 2Gb module and upgraded to 8 or 16Gb. I know the latter isn't officially supported, but does work.

 

[Flinty]

Sorry, i should have mentioned the n54l spec in the op.

8gb ram with everything else stock.

 

[gpsguy]

How are you performing your tests?

I have a stock N40L (1.5GHz vs 2.2 in your 54) with 8Gb RAM and 2x2Tb Seagate Barracuda XT's in a ZFS mirror. IIRC, I was getting about 40'ish MB/s, last year when I ran tests on it's predecessor (using the same CPU).

CIFS performance with our CPU's will never be stellar, and the embedded Broadcom NIC probably doesn't perform as well as an Intel Pro/1000. At the end of the day, it meets my needs.

 

[Flinty]

Sorry, I thought I had mentioned it is a NFS share in the first post !

Ifconfig spits out the right result, as does iperf.

The test was ultimately trying to copy my music files from the windows machine to the N54l.

Thanks

 

[lpittman]

Hey Flinty - small files don't really "have the time" to get up to speed ... can you try transferring some large files? Over 500mb is a good place to start.

 

[Flinty]

Ok, so tried a 1gb file and sat at around 65Mbps so I guess it's ok ?

Thanks

 

[lpittman]

65MB/s is acceptable imo. I peak at around 95 MB/s with my system. Have you tried any of the tweaks listed around the forum?

 

[Flinty]

Thanks,

Like this ?

If you have issues with r/w speeds on your ZFS nas, try (as the above post said) to enter vfs.zfs.prefetch_disable=0 in /boot/loader.conf (i had to add it to my file)
If you boot off a usbstick as i do, your rootfs will probably be read-only.
To edit the files issue a mount -uw / command (as root) before you try to edit loader.conf

 

[lpittman]

That's one of em, this is also a good resource:

https://wiki.freebsd.org/ZFSTuningGuide

Also - just search the forum for NTFS performance and ZFS performance.