Very Slow Read & Write Speeds over Gigabit Network

[Ryanteck]

Hi,

Not sure if this is the right are of the forum or not and think it's best suited here.

I have a HP Microserver (Old Style model 7 I think) which has 3 Hard Drives In.
2 Hard drives are in a Raid 1 for backup media and are 2 Seagate Barracudas (http://www.dabs.com/products/seagate-250gb-barracuda-sata-600-7200rpm-16mb-3-5--hard-drive-7M38.html)

The other hard-drive is an old Hitachi 1TB drive (7200RPM, around 100MB/s Read)

The issue is that on either the 1 TB on its own or the 2 drives in Raid 1 the read and write speeds are at best 50MB/s. I've tried this using SFTP (which I expect to be slower due to being encrypted) and CIFS / SMB which gets the cap at 50MB/s read or write.

I'm testing between the Microserver and my computer which is an Intel pentium anniversary edition CPU, 8GB of RAM and a 10K Workstation Drive (tests at 200MB/S read on average).

The Microserver has been upgraded to 8GB of Non ECC Kingston HyperX Memory.

I've ran iperf between the server and my computer and get the full gigabit as expected. The same also applies when testing to my laptop over cable.

The network adapter is a Broadcom BCM5723, I don't suspect this is the issue however I know that Broadcom aren't the best on Unix based systems.

I was just wondering what would be the limiting factor here. If the network card may be at fault I can get another but don't want to buy one for no improvement.

I'd be expecting around 80MB/S ideally as when I've read a file off of the Raid 1 array to /dev/zero I get around 110-115 on average.

Thanks -
Ryan Walmsley

 

[DrKK]

You might try FTP. On my system, FTP is about twice as fast as SFTP.

 

[Ryanteck]

Aha, 90MB/s which is what I expected.

I could understand SFTP being slow but expected samba to be faster?

Thanks

 

[DrKK]

Aha, 90MB/s which is what I expected.

I could understand SFTP being slow but expected samba to be faster?

Thanks

There's just so many variables in the case of SMB. So much depends on so many factors. There might be some tunings you can set, server-side and/or client-side, to achieve better performance. I achieve, in default configuration, about 70 Mbps up and 130Mbps down on my 802.11n wireless via SMB, so you certainly have either a hardware or driver issue. You should be doing better.