nfs server speed issue

[fvdw]

I didn't know from samba and Ubuntu, I run windows 7 on my PC's, there also FTP you could check out.

Its funny that reading goes ok and writing not on NFS, If the server would have a problem then you would expect that also reading should be an issue. I used a windows (xp) NFS client, thats not known as very reliable when doing the write it seems to hang the system for periods of time, its waiting for something that doesn't come and that can be network communication.
I read here http://tldp.org/HOWTO/NFS-HOWTO/perform ... BLOCKSIZES that block size setting for reading and writing can influence performance. To large a small blocks maybe confuse the network communication between server and client.
Maybe you can have a look this if you have some experience with it and see if your NFS client can mount the shares with a different block size to see if that sorts the problem.

[firwareslut]

I will test the blocksize stuff and see.

The ftp is fine. It's only samba that is slow.

[fvdw]

ok, in the meantime I will see if it is possible to compile nfs-util myself. Those ipkg packages are not always reliable and in thism case its an older version of the nfs server 1.1.1 or so while the latest is 1.2.5 that one I will try to compile. But don't be to enthusiastic my experience with these packages is that dependencies they have can be a problem. But we will se. As it is now the writing to the NAS via NFS is horrible.

[firwareslut]

main:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/NETWORKHD/test bs=16k count=16384
16384+0 records in
16384+0 records out
268435456 bytes (268 MB) copied, 21.0588 s, 12.7 MB/s

real 0m21.103s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.520s
main:~$ time dd if=/dev/zero of=/media/NETWORKHD/test bs=32k count=32728
32728+0 records in
32728+0 records out
1072431104 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 80.9952 s, 13.2 MB/s

real 1m21.475s
user 0m0.008s
sys 0m1.144s

I tried various sizes and they all went around the same overall speed.

192.168.0.150:/share/1000/public /media/NETWORKHD nfs rw,users,noauto,rsize=32728,wsize=32728 0 0

Nothing really conclusive except a slower overall transfer rate. It's hard to see what's going on (I can't see if it's stopping/starting for example).

I tried the nfs util from the funplug package a while ago and that was even worse (but the driver wasn't part of the kernel).

[fvdw]

I downloaded the latest version and tried to compile, as expected some dependency problems to to solve.
It will be a version without tcp wrappers and disable nfs4 but that should be no real issue.

[fvdw]

got it compiled, think still some adaptations in the compile is necessary (still some warning during compile of one is important I think, think I can solve that) but the new version of nfs-utils (version 1.2.5) I compiled is already working It has more files then the old version installed which was an optware version (1.1.0 I believe).

I have no pc running Linux but was able to use the nfs client in windows 7 to test it. Reading speed is about the same on the old nfs server (25-30MB/s) writing around 15 MB/s and stable below a screen shot from the network traffic during writing and reading. In the center of the graph (red arrow) you can see the network traffic while writing a 1 GB file, behind it is the traffic when reading the same file (blue arrow). As you can see both reach a level of about 27MB/s (27% of 1 gigabit), when writing it is even a little higher. Despite that writing takes about 2 times longer, look to the length of the graph when reading and writing, during reading it needs less time. It seems that during writing also data is send back from the NAS to the windows PC, probably to control the dataflow). This is the same behavior I see on Samba. So it seems this new version improves the situation :ugeek: :mrgreen:
Unfortunate it are not a few files to exchange to embed it in the firmware, coming week(s) need to look at that when finding some time for it

nfs-new.JPG

[firwareslut]

Ok this looks like good news! I found some other small problems too with a mounted NFS share. If the client doesnt umount cleanly then sometimes it cannot reconnect again until the NAS is rebooted. I have tried writiing some unmount scripts in the suspend and shutdown scripts for the client but I have not had much success yet.

I will try playing around with the fstab options and see if I can figure out the problem.

Thanks for the efforts in helping with my problem. I look forward to a new firmware build later in the year when you have time :)