Transfer Speed

[marcogiglio]

Hi!
I'm having trouble with the transfer speed inside my network, from any pc to Amahi.
On my pc i have both Windows 7 and Ubuntu. With Ubuntu, i can't go over 30 mb/s. I tried everything, also setting up jumbo frames, but it seems that Ubuntu doesn't allow me to go over that limit. With Windows 7 i get a really strange behaviour: right now i'm moving a file at less then 10 mb/s (and on the network just Amahi and my pc are turned on), but there are times where i saw a transfer rate close to 100 mb/s. Both Amahi and my pc have the same hard drives: 2x Samsung Spinpoint F3 1 Tb. The Amahi box has a Core 2 CPU and 2 GB of ram.
My switch is a Netgear GS116:
http://www.netgear.com/products/busines ... GS116.aspx
Any suggestions?

[cpg]

Did you ever resolve this?

I wonder because we did tweak some settings in the samba configuration. However, it was widely reported to be better when we changed it (much better in fact).

The fact that you are messing around with jumbo frames tells me you know what you are doing, however, have you looked at the cabling?

I had once a cable that was acting up. Took me a long time to find.

Try diagnostics like pinging with larger frames or something to see if you get some loss.

[blackbird]

yeah thats cool, isnt it?
At beginning i transfered with a bandwith of 35MB/s and moren constantly. But now, i dont know why, i am never over 10MB/s. Over network and also when Greyhole moves the data around on the disks...

im totally frustrated...

[cpg]

Did you change any configuration or clients?

Unless you give some info to work with, we can't tell what could be going on.

We hate frustrated users!

[blackbird]

no, ive changed nothing. But after the transferspeed goes down ive tried to tune Samba and checked my Clients. But nothing will help.

The speed goes down after i had some trouble. I transfered a lot of data (over 160GB) and ive noticed that everything is stored on my system drive and not in the pool. But my systemdrive is only a 160GB drive so it filled completly up and i got an error (ruby or something like that). I thought ok, than ill wait until Greyhole moved the Data to my Pool. But nothing happens. so i deleted the data from share and restarted my Amahi Server.
I think after that everything works wrong. Transferspeed is not the only problem. When i copy data its only stored on the Systemdrive. But this is'nt marked for Pool. and all shares are pool shares...

And the other crazy thing is that transfer between the HDDs is also only on 10MB/s.
Systemdrive is an 160GB Seagate and the other on is a 1TB Caviar Green.

If its too complicated to solve this Problem i would install Fedora and Amahi new. But whats with my Shares on the 1TB drive? I dont know how to reintegrate them to Greyhole...

[blackbird]

So transfer was up to 35MB/s (many small files) and up to 70MB/s (one big files).
This is quiet good. But i had to setup everything new and lost all data

NOW the Greyhole process workes the hole time on root drive (dont know why) and transfer from landing zone to shares is down to 100KB/s. UNUSABLE!
See Bug#676

[sgtfoo]

I amalso seeing very slow transfer speeds over a gigabit capable network.

[apastor]

I had the same problem until I resolved it.

My old network was 10/100MB and I was getting speeds of about 9MB - 11MB/s

When I upgrade to gigabit network this is where I learned its a few things you need to get gigbit speeds.

Switches have to be gigabit (obvisouly)
Cables have to be CAT5e or CAT6, not CAT5

I Did this and my home network and I was getting 35MB/s transfer speeds. I was scratching my head trying to figure out the problem.

After some digging, I realized I was using a PCI Gigabit card. PCI have a limitation on t he bus to 233Mbits/sec. Thats why I was getting the slower then expected speeds.

I swapped out that card for a PCI-e card. Now my transfer speeds jumped to about 60MB-70MB/sec. Better but not good enough. I should be getting more.


My home server I setup was powered by a Low powers AMD CPU. AMD 3650e (something like that). It was a dual core 1.6Ghz.
After doing tons of research, I noticed a couple people mentioning that CPU power is needed to get gigabit speeds.

I was reluctant to believe that at first, thinking the dual core 1.6 should be more then enough.
But being curious, I found a AMD Phenon 9650 2.3Ghz (Quad-core) CPU. I put that CPU in and did tests.

Now my speeds went from 60MB/s to 90-100MB/s.

I am much happier with those speeds, and I know it can go faster, but this point its a HDD limitation. Once I go raid, then it will speed up more. But I am getting 10x the speed I was getting on my old network and server setup.

So basically you will need the following (from my experience)


Switched and proper cables.
Server with PCI-e (or onboard gigabit) network card.
Faster CPU on server side.
Standard HDD's. I am using Seagate 7200.12 1TB Sata2 drives.


Hope this helps you and anyone else trying to get faster network speeds.

[rjwaldren]

What NIC are you using. If it's a realtek chipset (rl81XX) that appears to be on most all boards I've looked at, check what driver it is using. If your using the r8169 driver . You may benefit from compiling the r8168 driver from the realtek site.

This made all the difference on my D510MO...Why Intel it using a known lousy third party chip will never make sense.

[sgtfoo]

I may be an intermediate Linux user, but I've been working with computers for many years. SOme of what you say is not news and some is just odd..

A CPU boost from 1.6Ghz to 2.3Ghz quad-core might give a "slightly" and I mean VERY slight change in data transfer speeds... We're talking mere 0.5MB/s speed difference.

I already have cat5e and cat6 allover my network. That's a no-brainer. So that's not the issue. I've had files go between machines at faster speeds than to my Amahi box.

Now let's do some math....

the limit of a 10/100 NIC at max would be 100 Mbit / s = 12.5 MB / s
(I don't have this limitation)
the PCI NIC limit would be 233 Mbit / s = 29.125 MB / s
(I don't have this limitation either)
I run through my motherboard's Gigabit connection
so...
1 Gbit / s = 128 MB / s

My Drives, most of which are WD Greens, running through SATA2 pretty much cap out at 100 MB/s transfer speeds. I have a dual-core Athlon x64 2.2Ghz CPU in there and 6GB of RAM. I doubt those are the culprits at all.

So once again... why do I see 10MB/s speeds at best lately? All of the machines feeding the server have Gigabit NICs with plenty of computer power and faster hard drives too. And yes, my router has gigabit switching.