Readings to get better network performance

[Cubytus]

Hi there,

as most of those using the LaCie Cloudbox, and probably other devices as well, we kknow that fvdw does provide much more features than stock LaCie. However, network performance is not one of those, and is still very slow, never going above 30MBps on a Gigabit Ethernet network.

Since fvdw is based upon an Arch Linux Kernel, I came across two pages, suggested by a poster on OMV's forum, that describe ways to increase network performance:
https://linuxengineering.wordpress.com/2014/08/03/performance-tuning-with-pogoplug-v4
http://obihoernchen.net/877/setup-samba-4-on-arch-linux/

Where would be the sysctl.conf be in the fvdw distribution?

[fvdw]

Verry interesting article. Thx for sure we will have a look at and see if it can help to improve performance.
One remark. Fvdw-sl as running on the kirkwood devices is not based on Archlinux. We use our own compiled kernel using the source files from kernel.org.
If I look to the performance when using samba in comparison with what is mentioned in this article 25 MB for write and 40 for read they are almostthe same. We tried samba 4 but it slows down transfer due to higher cpu loads. There is a post on this subject on the forum.
Also is the max transfer speed reallly that important ? I personally do not copy very often big files.

[fvdw]

I tried the suggested settings but saw little or no improvement of the the most of them
Only setting txqueuelen 5000 seems to give some improvement for reading

if you wish you can try yourself sysctl command is included
You can make a systctl.conf file yourself and put it in /etc folder
To set the parameter in the conf file use this

Code: Select all

sysctl -e -p /etc/sysctl.conf

I earlier versions of the fvdw-sl firmware the performance was better at the time we used older kernels based on linux 2.6.xx..yy (just like lacie does in their firmware)
But we upgrade to Linux 3 , it seems that these kernel consume more cpu power that affects the performance of file transfer.
I did a test with an old 2.6.39.4 kernel to quantify the difference and saw that with the 2.6.39.4 kernel the performance was almost 30% better.

I attached it for you, you can load it using the fvdw-sl console using the option load external kernel.
Ps it will run but it will fail to load the modules needed for usb support as the modules for 2.6.39.4 are not in the firmware anymore. But you should be able to test samba. Just reboot your nas to get the normal kernel back running.

[fvdw]

I edited my last post !

[Cubytus]

Thanks, I'll have a look. However there must be a way to get better performance out of the NAS. Is it slow because the system is run from the same drive as the one data is being written onto / read from? If this is the case, loading more modules in RAM may help.

[Cubytus]

I know the article covers Samba, but it's a protocol that should be discouraged: it's heavy on the CPU and not very optimized on Linux anyway.
With default configuration, fvdw-equipped NAS make pretty good download stations, but not so interesting as network-attached mass storage due to the low performance. Perhaps the kernel defaults at compilation time aren't optimal for low-power, embedded CPUs? At least that's what the article points out.

Transfer speed is important for different reasons:
Fundamentally I find it wrong that a HDD capable of well over 100MBps can't go past a quarter of that. What is the purpose of a fast hard drive, then?
Hard drives installed are usually pretty large, making them very tempting to store large, high-definition movies. But if they can't be fluidly streamed or transferred, then this interest lowers. At 25MBps, it means almost 24 hours to fill it in.
Faster transfer means the hard drive works less, so lengthens its lifetime and doesn't get as hot. And we all know that temperature is number one's hard drive enemy.
Or we may simply want to be able to serve more than one user at a time, perhaps a family. But this isn't possible with such low transfer rates.