Transfer Speeds and suggestions on system

[rmccoy83]

I had some extra parts laying around so I decided to build my first FreeNAS system. I'm using FreeNAS 8.3.0 with ZFS file system. Fairly small amount of space currently 2 x 250gb.
System specs:

GA-78LMT-S2P Socket AM3+ 760G
AMD Phenom II 3.2 Quad Core
4GB Crucial Ballistix Memory
Antec 500w PSU

I'm currently using a SMCD3GNV wireless gateway from comcast. Will be swapping to my own modem and router soon but I work from home and my router I currently have doesn't seem to work properly.

I'm only getting 30 - 35MB/sec over network. My main pc is showing a gigabit connection, the SMC wireless gateway is capable of Gigabit and all ethernet is 5e. And the FreeNAS system is also showing gigabit connection.
If anyone has some suggestions to check or where the bottleneck may be I would greatly appreciate it.

Also have a question about my current build, I've always been very worried of my pc overheating, but would like to minimize the amount of fans I have running in the system to drop the power consumption. In freenas I can see the temp of only 2 cores, which sit at about 22C. From what I have seen the temp on single cores is always fairly low on AMD but the temp of the cpu as a whole runs a bit hotter. Would it be wise to either disable 2 cores on the cpu or underclock them to conserve power and how far should I go without hurting performance on the system? And whats the max temp I should be at idle when removing cooling from the case?

Thanks
rmccoy

 

[cyberjock]

How about.. RTFM?

From the manual:

The best way to get the most out of your FreeNAS® system is to install as much RAM as possible. If your RAM is limited, consider using UFS until you can afford better hardware. ZFS typically requires a minimum of 8 GB of RAM in order to provide good performance. The more RAM, the better the performance, and the FreeNAS® Forums provide anecdotal evidence from users on how much performance is gained by adding more RAM. For systems with large disk capacity (greater than 6 TB), a general rule of thumb is 1 GB of RAM for every 1TB of storage. This post describes how RAM is used by ZFS.

NOTE: by default, ZFS disables pre-fetching (caching) for systems containing less than 4 GB of usable RAM. Not using pre-fetching can really slow down performance. 4 GB of usable RAM is not the same thing as 4 GB of installed RAM as the operating system resides in RAM. This means that the practical pre-fetching threshold is 6 GB, or 8 GB of installed RAM. You can still use ZFS with less RAM, but performance will be effected.

So remind me again why you are posting? Because the manual tells you exactly what NOT to do.. and you do it anyway. Then you post the forum asking why it worked exactly like the manual said. Color me shocked.

Even if you upgrade your RAM and it still doesn't make you happy, I really have to question your thought process. If you ignored one important fact in the manual, what else did you ignore? And why should the people in the forum waste their time on someone that couldn't be bothered to read the included manual and at least try to follow some resemblance of what it has to say.

 

[rmccoy83]

I originally started with 8gb in the system when I built it, was still undecided if I was going to keep it, so I used from another system. After building it I decided it worked well for me but did not have 8gb to dedicate to it. From others experience they seemed ok with only 4gb on ZFS with a small amount of storage, so I gave it a shot and seemed to work fine. The difference between 8gb and 4gb on transfer speed is very small if any. So I suspected another issue. I'll be putting 8gb in it soon, was just curious of any other possible issues.

I will post back after increasing the memory and some more research.

Thanks

 

[eraser]

What method are you using to share files from your FreeNAS server? On my test rig (FreeNAS 8.3.0 P1), I found that sharing storage via iSCSI was the fastest (able to saturate a 1Gbps network link), with NFS and CIFS being less than half the speed.

 

[rmccoy83]

I am using CIFS, just did a bit of reading about it. Am I able to use my existing volumes for iSCSI? From the instructions it seems to require the drive to be wiped. If that is the case I will wait for another time to setup iSCSI, and add more memory soon. I made a small mistake when setting this up. I had an old dell system that I played with before building this one. Had a x86 version and x64 version on flash drives already and accidently mixed them up and used the x86 version. Seeing startup transfer speeds around 130MB/s and slowly drops off to around 70MB/s on 64 bit so I'm happy with that for now.

 

[eraser]

I am using CIFS, ... Seeing startup transfer speeds around 130MB/s and slowly drops off to around 70MB/s on 64 bit so I'm happy with that for now.

130 MB/s is very close to the max transfer rate over a 1 Gb/s network link (hints that data is being retrieved from cache instead of disk). 70 MB/s is close to the transfer rate of a single Hard Drive (which may be expected, depending on how your disks are configured).

My "problem" with CIFS is that I am always hovering around 60 MB/s even when testing against a 50 MB test file (which should fit entirely into cache), when the underlying disks can do better. Hmm, "perhaps I am not hitting cache as expected?", mumbles Eraser as he heads off to do more reading on how to best tweak/configure CIFS...

 

[cyberjock]

Are you sure that it will fit in the cache when you don't even have the required RAM? mumbles as he walks away....

 

[eraser]

Are you sure that it will fit in the cache when you don't even have the required RAM? mumbles as he walks away....

Replying to wrong poster. My test system has 8 GB RAM installed.