hdd - read performance issue on NSA325v2 with latest (Debian)Kernel / u-Boot

Hi,

i recently installed debian and u-boot on my old nsa325v2. It all worked flawlessly and i installed openmediavault as well.

But i noticed one strange thing: as i was backing up the original raid, i got read speeds of ~100mb/s (over gigabit ethernet). Now with similar settings (raid1, 2 western digital 3 tb hdds) i only get ~50mb/s. Hdparm gives me ~130mb/s on each hdd and iperf gives me ~900mbits on ehternet. I tryed smb and nfs. Smb was almost 100% cpu but nfs with the same file only 60-70%. Read performance was the same, around 50mb/s. Write speed is good, ~50mb/s.

Does someone know a possibility to get the "old" read speeds back?



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/14/2018 07:33AM by azriel.

You can use iperf3 to check your network throughputs. Login as root, run iperf3 -s as a server on either your NAS device or a computer, then on the other device just run iperf3 -c <IP Address of iperf3 server> to find out what your network throughput will be. This will at least tell you if the bottleneck is due to the network (which I doubt). OTOH, you may wanna read this post to fiddle with wsize. In my Seagate GoFLEX Home, I was able to double the R/W throughputs. Let us know how this will turn out.

NAS as server (over multiple trys always roughly the same result):
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.09 GBytes 933 Mbits/sec 0 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.00 sec 1.08 GBytes 931 Mbits/sec receiver

NAS as client is more interesting (a lot of variation):
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.01 sec 846 MBytes 709 Mbits/sec 70 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.01 sec 846 MBytes 709 Mbits/sec receiver

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.03 sec 583 MBytes 487 Mbits/sec 60 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.03 sec 583 MBytes 487 Mbits/sec receiver

[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth Retr
[ 4] 0.00-10.01 sec 787 MBytes 660 Mbits/sec 319 sender
[ 4] 0.00-10.01 sec 787 MBytes 660 Mbits/sec receiver

hdparm -tT:

hdd1:

Timing cached reads: 644 MB in 2.00 seconds = 322.08 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 428 MB in 3.00 seconds = 142.58 MB/sec

hdd2:

Timing cached reads: 612 MB in 2.00 seconds = 305.37 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 446 MB in 3.00 seconds = 148.55 MB/sec



update:
Hmm maybe it has something todo with smb1 vs newer? I noticed on stock nas linux there was only smb1 available. Maybe the cpu limits the transfer speed (as stated earlier, cpu was ~100% on smbd while transfer)? I just tested nfs with another linux ethernet connected computer and got ~60mb/s on a non raid1 filesystem... Will test a raid1 soon.



Edited 2 time(s). Last edit at 09/14/2018 12:05PM by azriel.

azriel Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> I just tested nfs with another linux ethernet connected computer and got ~60mb/s on a non raid1 filesystem... Will test a raid1 soon.
>
A 60 mbps (megabits/s) is definitely not good unless you mean 60 MBps (MegaBytes/s).

If you are accessing your NAS and its CPU usage skyrockets, then something isn't right, AFAICT. You may wanna run top to observe the memory and/or CPU usage during the NAS access.

BTW, I use this F3 utility to find out the R/W throughput on my NAS. It gives a bit lower value than the dd utility.

Hey habibie,

thanks for the comments. I meant MB. After a few tests i achieved between 60 and 70 MBps using nfs. I think thats quite good. Only via smb (2?) i only get between 40-50MBps. But i have also read that smb2 requires more computation than smb1 and my guess is thats the limiting factor here. Also zyxel never introduced smb2 to the nsa325v2 only the later models.

Like you said, top showed 100% cpu while transfering a file, nfs only used 60-70%. But only during filetransfer.

I'm ok with these kinds of speed. Also i'm happy to prolong the life of my nas and have a working debian :-)

Thank you so much, i think it's all good now.

azriel,

Also see the Wiki thread:
https://forum.doozan.com/read.php?2,23630

These threads might have some settings that can improve your Samba performance.

Quote

Samba

Samba smb.conf for a simple set up
HowTo setup Samba/CIFS shares

-bodhi
===========================
Forum Wiki
bodhi's corner (buy bodhi a beer)

azriel Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hey habibie,
>
> I meant MB. After a few tests i achieved between 60 and 70 MBps using nfs. I think thats quite good.
>
Indeed and that's definitely a good throughput. Is that for R/W? BTW, can you please share your NFS server/client configuration settings?

Hey,

it's up to ~70MBps read and 50MBps write. I have no special configuration for nfs, i just installed openmediavault and enabled nfs.

azriel Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Hey,
>
> it's up to ~70MBps read and 50MBps write. I have no special configuration for nfs, i just installed openmediavault and enabled nfs.
>
That's a pretty good R/W throughput.