Pauven

As much as I enjoy being able to set custom banners, the scaling issue is a real challenge. I'm often moving my browser windows around and setting them to different sizes. Sometimes I have my Unraid window full screen (on a 4K monitor), and sometimes half-width on the screen, and sometimes quarter screen, and on rare occasions a truly custom size where I've grabbed the browser edge and widened/compressed with window width to fit what I'm working on. I also will look at it on other resolution screens or mobile devices. Because the banner image stretches to fit the full width, it becomes impossible to have a 1 resolution image that works perfectly on all screen ratios and resolutions. The current implementation really feels like a 1990's solution. This is extra frustrating with banners that have circular elements, like the 2001 Space Odyssey / HAL and Iron Man / Jarvis banners I created for another user several weeks back. If your browser width is set to the exact same width as the banner, it looks perfect. Anything else and you get ovals, and text in the banner is stretched/compressed in an ugly fashion. On that Jarvis banner, I even positioned a couple "folder" graphical elements to sit behind the Unraid version & server info text, but again this only works if you have the right browser width, otherwise the text doesn't center on these elements. Because I work with web design tools like WordPress, I know that better solutions are possible. Instead of stretching, the image could be scaled keeping the aspect ratio fixed. Possibly the Unraid text elements could scale with the image, maintaining positions on top of graphical elements. If cropping is necessary, I think cropping top/bottom is preferable to cropping the sides, though I'm sure there could be some banners where cropping width is a better solution - perhaps that could be a setting we can toggle. It even crossed my mind that it might be possible to have a multi-segment banner, where you have separate "Left", "Center", and "Right" images that get closer/further away from each other as the browser width changes. This could allow for you to set a static background for the Unraid text elements on the left and right, and a floating center image that ties it all together. Perhaps you would even need 5 elements to make this work correctly: "Left", "Left Gap Filler", Center", "Right Gap Filler", "Right". The Gap Fillers could stretch between the Center and Left/Right, connecting them seamlessly. That way we as banner designers can achieve the near impossible: correct aspect ratio and positioning behind the text elements with a modern responsive behavior to browser width changes. It would be very easy for a banner designer to chop a banner into 5 segments. Unfortunately, I don't have the programming skills to contribute to enhancing Unraid. All I can do is sit here and share ideas, hoping to get some discussion going on this challenge. Perhaps one of the really smart guys can even make it happen...

Interesting, I did not know this. I knew some users had performance issues with 6.8 and that Lime-Tech was still refining their logic, but I hadn't heard that some of the tunables can still help. I guess once I get off my legacy version I can revisit this again. Most likely I'm waiting for 6.9.1, fingers crossed. Though to be honest, I do hope Lime-Tech can figure out the logic to truly make UTT unnecessary. Thanks, it feels good to help and even better to be appreciated!

Cool, you've got the right idea. Just wondering if you are fully leveraging it with a front-end so you don't have to insert discs. Essentially, your discs are your backup, and your array is your media server. I've got 1800+ movies stored away in boxes in the basement (my backup), and watch everything directly from my array. Using my own GUI front-end, of course... 😉

Yes. Yeeeeesssssss. This! I realize that is asking a lot, as typically files are only allowed to exist in one or the other, not both, and this probably throws off some internal checks. But it is definitely a feature I want (plus SSD/NVMe array support, which got a lot of votes but no mentions). My use case is that I have certain data (music/mp3's, software code, etc.) that I want immediate, fast access to all the time, without spinning up any drives, so it makes sense to put them on my NVMe cache drive. But I want that data backed up too. Sure, I can buy another $600 2TB NVMe drive just to create a mirrored cache pool, but ouch that's a lot of $$$. I'd rather give Lime-Tech $120 for another license that I don't need (let's call it a donation, baby), so that these files can be stored both in my protected array and my unprotected cache. All reads would come from cache, and all writes would go to both (or cache first, sync later). I had a script a while back that was syncing a few directories from my cache drive to my array, but it stopped working a while back and I haven't bothered to try and fix it. Plus, I think it was causing those duplicate file error messages as Unraid was detecting I had the same file in cache and the array, so I've been hesitant to try doing this again. I looked for a plugin that would handle this and found nothing. Native Unraid functionality for a "Use Cache Disk: Both" option would be awesome.

UTT is not compatible with Unraid v6.8 or later. I developed the latest version using Unraid 6.6.6 (which is what I'm still running). I've avoided the 6.7.x series due to some known performance issues, and 6.8 for even bigger issues. So I don't have more recent versions available for testing and development. 6.6.6 works perfectly for me, and I have zero reason to chase version upgrades just to be on a #, so I might be here for a while. Which is all really pointless anyway, since Lime-Tech took away the tunables that UTT tunes in v6.8. In theory, UTT is dead and no longer even needed with v6.8, since Lime-Tech took back control of these tunables and have their own internal logic for tuning them. So long story short, UTT is dead for Unraid 6.8 or later. Though it still works for 6.7.3 and earlier.

I tried...

Drats. So wait... I was actually too quick to create the new version of UTT? I could have sat on my tookus and let Limetech fix the issue for me? That's disappointing. But your tuned values are sky-high, probably among the highest I have ever seen shared here. I would say that you have a special needs controller. Definitely share this with Limetech. Very interesting, thanks for sharing. It took me a long time and a lot of effort to come up with a testing strategy for the v6.0-v6.7 tunables, and these changes with 6.8 pretty much throw all that out the window. If anyone sees any info regarding the new tunables, please repost here. And fingers crossed that Limetech makes UTT unnecessary, as I really really really don't want to do it all over yet again...

In my experience, a rebuild should be similar in time to a parity check. The parity check reads from all drives simultaneously, while a rebuild writes to one and reads from all others. Total bandwidth is close to identical, as is parity calculation load on the CPU. As jbartlett advised, one of your drives could be running slow.

Tom, any reason you are no longer posting that RC's are available in the Prerelease forum? The last one I see is "Unraid OS version 6.7.0-rc8 available". Paul

I think that is a really interesting finding. In a disk to disk transfer, you're both reading from and writing to 3 disks simultaneously (4 if you had dual parity), which is a very different workload than just reading from all disks simultaneously. I'm guessing what happened is that you went so low in memory, that disk to disk transfers were impacted. I'll have to do some testing on my server and see if that is something I can replicate. You have a server that responds very well to low values, at least as far as parity checks go. Actually, it seems to respond the same for almost any set of values, achieving around 141 MB/s across the board except for a few edge cases. For that type of server, you're probably best off just running stock Unraid tunables settings.

Hi @DanielCoffey, thanks for lending a helping hand. Even though it has the same name, for some reason the file you posted has a different size than the original version. I think it would be wise if you remove the file you posted, just in case. Also, the original file is hosted on the Unraid forum, which has done a decent job of hosting files for years. Not sure why vekselstrom had an issue downloading, though it seems to have been a temporary issue. I think it would be best if we keep the download option centralized in the first post, which gives me control over updates.

My monthly parity check completed in another record time for my server, dropping another 12 seconds (haha). Even though the UTT v4.1 enhancements resulted in slightly better peak numbers, my server was already well optimized so the additional performance was not impactful.

UTT does not do any writes, only reads. Specifically, it applies a combination of tunables parameters, then initiates a non-correcting (read only) parity check, let's it run for 5 or 10 minutes (depending upon the test length you chose), then aborts the parity check. It then tries the next set of values and repeats. I believe dalben's report might be the very first time a drive failure has been reported during testing. UTT v4 works the same basic way as the previous versions, so there's years of data behind that statement. In theory, the tests that UTT performs are no more strenuous then a regular parity check. But anytime you spin up and use your hard drives, especially all of them at once generating max possible heat, you risk a drive failure - same as during a parity check. Some may feel that the stress is slightly harder than a parity check, as UTT keeps repeating the first 5/10 minutes of the parity check, for dozens of times (minimum 82 times, maximum 139 times), so it keeps all of your drives spinning at their fastest/hottest for the entire test period, unlike a true parity check that would allow smaller drives to complete and spin down as larger drives continue the check. But the stress should be less than hard drive bench-marking, especially tests that do random small file reads/writes and generate lots of head movement.

Array integrity comes first, you did the right thing. Unfortunately, the slightly different results in this run causes the script to test a lower range in Pass 2, so it didn't retest that magical 177 MB/s test from your earlier run. Would have been interesting to see it retested, and if it consistently performs better.

Uhmmmm... --- TEST PASS 2 (10 Hrs - 49 Sample Points @ 10min Duration) --- Tst | RAM | stri | win | req | thresh | MB/s ---------------------------------------------- 1 | 207 | 6144 | 3072 | 128 | 3064 | 148.0 2 | 216 | 6400 | 3200 | 128 | 3192 | 176.9 <-- !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! 3 | 224 | 6656 | 3328 | 128 | 3320 | 146.6 4 | 233 | 6912 | 3456 | 128 | 3448 | 148.5 5 | 242 | 7168 | 3584 | 128 | 3576 | 148.3 6 | 250 | 7424 | 3712 | 128 | 3704 | 148.3 7 | 259 | 7680 | 3840 | 128 | 3832 | 148.8 8 | 267 | 7936 | 3968 | 128 | 3960 | 148.6 9 | 276 | 8192 | 4096 | 128 | 4088 | 146.9 10 | 285 | 8448 | 4224 | 128 | 4216 | 149.0 11 | 293 | 8704 | 4352 | 128 | 4344 | 148.3 12 | 302 | 8960 | 4480 | 128 | 4472 | 149.1 13 | 311 | 9216 | 4608 | 128 | 4600 | 108.6 14 | 319 | 9472 | 4736 | 128 | 4728 | 148.5 15 | 328 | 9728 | 4864 | 128 | 4856 | 145.8 16 | 337 | 9984 | 4992 | 128 | 4984 | 149.0 17 | 345 |10240 | 5120 | 128 | 5112 | 148.5 I think that has to be some kind of glitch, but I can't imagine how. I've never seen a 30 MB/s jump on a specific setting combo like that. Unless the whole time the wife was watching a movie, except for that one test.

Definitely! I see a strong linear progression from 15 MB/s to 130 MB/s as the settings increase. I've never seen a range this large, or a speed that slow using Unraid default values! Fascinating! I'm very interested in seeing the Long results. Please include the CSV file too, I'll probably chart this one for everyone.

There's only a handful of options to choose from, the menu has been greatly simplified. Short Test Run this to see if your system appears to respond to changing the Unraid disk Tunables. If your results look mostly flat, then go on with life and forget about this tool - your server doesn't need it. Some servers behave the same no matter what tunables you use. But if you see dramatically different speeds from the Short Test, then that shows your server appears to react to changing the tunables, and one of the real tests below could be worth the time. Sometimes you will even seem the outlines of a bell curve forming in the Short Test results, which is a very strong indicator that your server responds well to tuning. This test only takes a few minutes, so you don't have to waste much time to see if your server responds to tuning. Also, keep in mind that even if your server responds well to tuning, the fastest parameters might still be the Unraid stock values, so there's no guarantee that running the tests will discover values that make your server faster. Normal Test This is the quickest real test. It does not test the nr_requests values, and it uses a 5 minute duration for each test. Because the test adapts to how your HD controller responds to the tunables, it will optionally test some additional value ranges, so the run time varies from 8 to 10 hours. Thorough Test Same as the Normal Test, but includes the nr_requests tests, which add another 4 hours to the Normal Test duration. So far we have found that once all the other tunables have been optimized (by the normal tests), that nr_requests default value of 128 is best, making the nr_requests tests basically a waste of time. But there is always the possibility that your server might be different, so I make this optional if you want to check. Long Test (Recommended) This is exactly the same as the Normal Test, except each test duration is doubled from 5 minutes to 10 minutes. That means the test takes twice as long. Longer tests improve accuracy, making it easier to identify which settings work best. For example, if the Normal Test had an accuracy of +/- 1.0 MB/s, then the Long Test might double that accuracy to +/- 0.5 MB/s or better. Because the test duration is doubled, the total test time also doubles to 16-20 hours. I recommend this test because it has the increased accuracy of the 10 minute duration, without the extra 8 hours for the nr_requests test that are probably a waste of time. Xtra-Long Test This is exactly the same as the Thorough Test, except each test duration is doubled from 5 minutes to 10 minutes, for the same reason as the Long Test. Another way to think of this is that this is the Long Test plus the nr_requests tests. Because the test duration is doubled, the nr_requests tests add 8 hours, bringing total test length up to the 24-28 hour range. FYI on Test Accuracy Test accuracy is determined by looking at tests that get repeated in successive passes, for example Pass 2 Test 25 is always a repeat of the test result chosen from Pass 1, and Pass 2 Test 1 is usually a repeat of another test in Pass 1 as well. The fastest test result from Passes 1 & 2 also gets repeated in Pass 3. Because the test points can vary by server, sometimes you will get several more repeated test points to compare to determine accuracy. By comparing the reported speeds from one pass to the others for the exact same tests, you can determine the accuracy. The accuracy varies by server. Some servers, like mine, produce an accuracy of +/- 0.1 MB/s every single time, it's incredibly consistent. Other servers might be +/- 2.5 MB/s, while a few servers are +/- 10 MB/s or worse. Note, if you are seeing large accuracy variances, that might mean that you have processes running that are access the array, reading or writing data, which essentially makes the test results invalid. When I look at the results and make an accuracy determination, I usually use the worst result (biggest variance) and use that as the accuracy for the entire test. So if the test chosen from Pass 1 was 140.5 MB/s, and the Pass 2 Test 25 was 140.7 MB/s, then that is an accuracy of +/- 0.2 MB/s. But if another repeated test was 143.0 MB/s in one pass, and 142.0 MB/s in another pass, then that indicates an accuracy of +/- 1.0 MB/s, so I say the entire test is +/- 1.0 MB/s. It takes time for servers to 'settle down', so to speak, and produce accurate results. Modern hard drives have huge caches, HD controllers often have caches, all designed to improve short-term performance. System activity may temporarily affect throughput. The longer tests minimize these effect, improving accuracy. Also, the longer tests just provide for better math. For example, consider a 10 second test versus a 10 minute (600 seconds) test. 2000 MB moved in 10 seconds = 200 MB/s, and 2060 MB moved in 10 seconds = 206 MB/s. 120,000 MB moved in 600 seconds is also 200 MB/s, but 120,060 MB moved in 600 seconds is 200.1 MB/s. In this example, the variance in both tests was just 60 MB, but the average speed accuracy increased from +/- 6.0 MB/s to +/- 0.1 MB/s, 60 times more accurate. This helps illustrate why the Short Test, which uses a 10 second duration, is not accurate enough for usable results. Understanding the accuracy of your results is important when trying to determine which result is fastest. If your accuracy is +/- 1.0 MB/s, then for all intents and purposes, 162 MB/s is the same as 163 MB/s, and there's no reason to pick 163 over 162.

Wow, you got some really good speeds for having 4TB drives in the mix - I'm guess those are 7200 RPM units. Looks like the repeated tests are +/- 2.6 MB/s, maybe more, so there's a lot of variance in your run to run results. What that means is that, except for the handful of results in the 140's to low 150's, all of the results are essentially the same. So almost any combo of values would work fine. Also, the Unraid stock settings look marvelous on your server - I would use those, and in the process save yourself over half a gig of RAM.

This might help a little, as the previous results are no longer valid. I'm surprised you got the increase you got without retesting the tunables. Also, your 16h43m run is not bad at all. 133 MB/s is the average speed, and sounds close to right for a 5400 RPM 8TB drive, but low for a 7200 RPM 8TB drive. An 8TB 7200 RPM drive will provide over 200 MB/s at the beginning of the disk, gradually falling to around 90 MB/s at the end of the disk. All HDD's do this. Your average speed will be somewhere in the middle, i.e. around 160 MB/s for a 7200 RPM 8TB drive.

Depending upon your motherboard's design, and which slot you have the card installed, the card may be communicating with the CPU through the southbridge chipset (PCH), which might be the bottleneck. Often the PCH has a smaller pipe to the CPU, which is shared with all southbridge devices, commonly including SATA ports. If the southbridge connection is the limiting factor, then even moving a drive from the H310 to a motherboard SATA port might not make any difference if the motherboard SATA port is also going through the southbridge. I followed the link you provided to your current Unraid server (hopefully it still is current), and downloaded the manual for your mainboard. I see that there is one x16 slot (electrically x8), and two x8 slots (one x8 and the other electrically x4): It looks like the two electrically x8 slots both connect directly to the CPU, so as long as you are using either of those, I think you would be okay. The electrically x4 slot, furthest from the CPU, connects to the PCH - you should not be using this one. Looking at the system block diagram, I see that all 6 SATA ports are connected through the PCH. If the PCH is the bottleneck, and if you have the H310 correctly installed in one of the two x8 PCIe slots connected to the CPU, then moving a drive from the H310 to the motherboard may actually further slow down speeds. In that case, you may want to try the opposite, and move an array drive from the motherboard to the H310, so that you have 8 drives connected directly to the CPU, and only 4 drives connected through the PCH. Lastly, the PCH connects to the CPU via a DMI v2.0 x4 link, which is good for 2GB/s. That should be more than sufficient for 4 array drives (I'm not counting your cache), but if you have the H310 installed in the PCH connected PCIe slot, then you have 11 drives going over this link. 11 drives * 130 MB/s * 1.36 overhead = 1945 MB/s, which is suspiciously close to the 2000 MB/s limit of the DMI connection between the PCH and the CPU.

The speeds seem artificially low. My 3TB 5400 RPM constrained array can hit 140 MB/s, and your 4TB drives should be marginally faster. While 130 MB/s is close, I think you have a bottleneck somewhere. With 7 drives on your SAS 2008 controller, let's check and see if that could be the culprit. 7 * 130 * 1.36 (this is an easier version of the formula I detailed above) = 1237 MB/s going through your controller. PCIe 1.0 x8 and PCIe 2.0 x4 both support 2000 MB/s, and PCIe 1.0 x4 supports 1000 MB/s. None of that lines up with 1237 MB/s, so it doesn't seem like this is a PCIe bus related constraint. That doesn't rule out the SAS 2008 controller, though - maybe it is just slow... Perhaps you have something about your build that doesn't show up in the report. Expanders? Maybe when using all of your SATA ports on your motherboard (sdb, sdc, sdd, sde) you are hitting some kind of bus limit? 4 * 130 * 1.36 = 707 MB/s, which again doesn't really seem like a common bus limit. I think you should try @jbartlett's DiskSpeed testing tool. Other thoughts: You have one of those servers that doesn't seem to react to changing the Unraid disk tunables. Except in extreme edge cases, you get basically the same speed no matter what. On the repeated tests, most seem to be withing +/- 0.9 MB/s, which is a fairly large variation, and for that reason your fastest measured speed of 129.7 is essentially the same as anything else hitting 127+ MB/s. Also, on at least one repeated test (Pass 1_Low Test 2 @ Thresh 120 = 127.8, and Pass 2 Test 1 = 116.6), the speed variation was 11.2 MB/s, which is huge. Perhaps you had some process/PC accessing the array during one of those, bringing down the score. For that reason, I say pretty much every test result was an identical result, and you probably won't notice much of any difference between any values. There's certainly no harm in using the Fastest values, as the memory utilization is so low there's no reason for you to chase more efficiency. Keep in mind if you use jbartlett's DiskSpeed test and find the bottleneck, and you make changes to fix it, you would want to rerun UTT to see if the Fastest settings change.

I just checked in NerdPack too, and looks like I have an update available: The version/name is a bit odd. On the slackware repository, the version is screen-4.6.2-x86_64-2.txz, but this one in NerdPack has an 's', 4.6.2s. Not sure if that means anything special...

root@Tower:/boot/utt# screen -version Screen version 4.06.01 (GNU) 10-Jul-17 I found this on my server in the NerdPack packages folder, so definitely the 64-bit version. Since it is already downloaded by NerdPack, you could just install it from there. \\<servername>\flash\config\plugins\NerdPack\packages\6.6\screen-4.6.1s-x86_64-1.txz

Any chance that the screen problem is because we are installing a 32-bit version on a 64-bit server? Anyone know? Here's a URL to the 64-bit version: https://mirrors.slackware.com/slackware/slackware64-current/slackware64/ap/screen-4.6.2-x86_64-2.txz

What was the output from step 3) Install screen: upgradepkg --install-new screen-4.6.2-i586-2.txz ?