klomasdo

Hi, Since a few weeks the server is running VMware again. Everything is now running as it used to do and no more unstable performance in sight. I'm not likely to use this software again, so I used the contact form to ask the unRAID-team about refunds. No response at all after some two-three weeks or so. Is there anyone in particular that I should contact? Thanks in advance...

Hi all, This post is a summary response to the latest posts. My colleague's servers are pure array, no cache pools. Reconstruct write is not activated, so 1 gbit is apparently possible, since some people can do that. The array has no USB-drives involved. USB-drives have only been used for tests and moving data back and forth. Regarding further tests, I'll have to cut my losses at this time. I've already spent way too much time on this and it has made too big an impact on other commitments. When all data has been exported, the server will be reverted to the old system again.

Docker really is easy on memory, VMware consumed most of it 😉 I don't understand it either, but there it is; end of the road... At least for now as I can't troubleshoot this and neglecting other things for any longer.

Hi, There is 64GB of RAM in the machine 🙂 total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 65861036 6418120 434376 4887352 59008540 53841624

Hi @jonp, Expectations are quite simple nice docker management (check, nice work on that). smooth storage for 'slow media' that also can take occasional periods of heavy duty usage (not impressed). Writing to an array with simple parity calculations will of course have some impact, but with a decent CPU and quite a lot of memory the resulting throughput is way lower than it should be for such simple operations. Transfers DO finish and after the tips given in the thread they run stable without choking the whole system as it initially did. During some testing yesterday evening it went down to (stable) 15MB per second for some unknown reason. All drives are the same: WD red 8TB 5400 rpm (various ages). They have in the past been well capable for sustained transfers at 1 gigabit wirespeed for hours and days on end. Did some comparisons with the colleague who introduced me to unRAID. He has the same hardware spec on two rigs, one has way better CPU and the other is quite weak on the CPU front. It clearly shows that both those two rigs get what can be expected. For example he is currently preparing a backup system and has been copying at wire speed for a couple of days now... Regarding IO-wait. High IO-wait has never been normal with a system that is idle or lightly loaded. I have a steady average around 10% when idle and way more during load. My colleague sits more close to 0.1% when idle and of course higher during load. We can't figure out why, but there it is. The snappier feeling was likely an effect of a newly rebooted system, since that went back to normal after a while. After browsing the forum for a while I can see other posts lately mentioning performance issues. In summary unRAID performance is either good or not. Guess I'm just having bad luck or something... Since I've spent WAY more time than intended, I'll convert back to VMware. When that is done I'll be requesting full refunds.

An update is in order, I think... Perc-card reinstalled and then only the parity disk was connected to spread out the bus utilization. Now the system feels a little bit snappier in response. With the settings provided by @PeteAsking this installation is now usable, although still a bit sluggish at times. Then, after some other have-to-do-things, I finally got around to convert the old Zabbix database. Thank you very much for quickly providing that @ich777. I can see quite some high IO wait that could explain the sluggishness. For the last few days it usually keeps around 10% with a 6 hour plateau around 40% one night. This feels a bit too high...

Well... one learns new things every day. Also worth mentioning is that the same behavior happen when copying over network. The external USB drive is a brand new "WD My Book WDBBGB0080HBK" and what I can see from remote is this USB-drive is 41 degrees C (from unassigned devices tab) Internal drives average is 31 degrees C (from array devices tab) Room temperature is 13 degrees C (unfurnished basement)

If left to it's own devices it will do about 40 MB/sec*, fluctuating 10 up or down. I've seen it stay around 20-25 MB/sec for a few minutes before going back again. At least the dockers keep running fairly well. There is some choppiness in the response times, though. * MegaBytes per second (just for clarity)

Short update: The Perc card was a complete fail; it refused to present more than two drives, so back to internal SATA again. Used the downtime to upgrade BIOS as well, no noticeable difference. Guess I'll just sit back and think things over for a while, that usually helps for some strange reason...

The setting for Reconstruct write has been restored as it was from the beginning. Those Disk Cache settings is a clear improvement in that the server does not completely choke any more. It might go on for as long as 20GB at full speed now before slowing down. Then it fluctuates more or less wildly between 15 to 60 MB/sec. Other read/write operations will crawl and the response times from various docker containers are quite choppy, but they are still working. Thanks very much for the hints. Will be interesting to see tomorrow if the Perc-card can do any more improvements.

Hi, Migrated all of the virtualization and most of the storage to a brand new unRAID 6.8.2 installation during the weekend. Four 8TB drives are connected to the internal SATA-ports on a Supermicro server, three data, one parity. Dockerization went well. Trouble started when feeding the array from external USB-drives. After copying about 8-11 GB the transfer starts stalling and if not stopped quick enough the whole system will grind to a halt for some time. After a while it will then self heal. Tried several times with same result. Copying over network also ends the same way. Since the docker containers paused for a while as well a lot of things goes out of sync and weird after effects show up. Not good. Things I tried: "tunable md_write_method: reconstruct write" - no difference write cache via the hdparm command - all drives already had write caching enabled. Enabled anyway for good measure - no difference Going through the BIOS settings for any apparent misconfigurations - none found that I can see. Thing to try: Tomorrow I expect to get hold of a Perc-card just to see if there is anything funny going on with the internal SATA-ports. Currently feeding the array with "rsync --bwlimit=30M ..." to keep things going for now. That has been stable for some 20 hours, but still it should not be a requirement to limit transfer rates. Any ideas? Diagnostics zip-file attached. Thanks in advance... unraid02-diagnostics-20200210-2253-v6-anon.zip

+1 for Zabbix Server, thanks.