Magua

After another reformat to ZFS, then a full system reboot, I did see an improvement. Initially it was roughly a hair under 500MB/s (without a reboot). With the reboot I'm seeing around 600MB/s flat.

Ah, good to know. I didn't check that. What the heck - I'll give this another shot and report back...

Here's another scenario. I just formatted my secondary NVME, its an older drive, 2TB - to ZFS. From my same source (machine, drive, everything) I copied the same 5GB file over. It averaged a hair under 500MB/s Then I reformatted that same NVME drive to XFS and repeated the exact same test - averaging around 675 MB/s. (Obviously slower than my primary NVME, but this is an older and slower drive.) Still - all other scenarios the same, XFS is 35% faster than ZFS. 🤷‍♂️ I fully realize this isn't a bullet-proof, scientific test - it's very anecdotal to my situation. I'm not trying to argue - just sharing my findings so that maybe if this comes up with another user they have another option to consider.

Clearly that's wrong. It gives a 50% speed improvement! I realize there is zero security or added functionality, but that's a different concern. Bottomline ==> changing from btrfs to xfs netted me my full 10 GB performance. I'll try changing from btrfs to zfs on my secondary NVME and see how that performs.

I think I'm finally in good shape (see attached). The last change I made: Convert the filesystem on the cache from btrfs to xfs. For my use-cases, I see no reason to have this remain as btrfs and that change, coupled with the Tips N Tweaks changes mentioned above have me properly maxed. Thanks!

Oh I get it - no system is perfect. I do get 50% faster speeds between my Windows desktop and my M1 Mac Mini though. (Example attached - same file, same network, same switch involved, same Windows source machine.)

Well - that change made a huge improvement: I clearly didn't understand that 'No' for disable offload was the preferred setting. Thanks for the guidance. Still not 10GB, but much better. Any other settings I should look out for?

And here's the current 'ethtool eth0' output:

Ah, understood. Thanks for clarifying. I've changed that setting to 'No', rebooted and tried a few more tests. It helped, but only about a 25% improvement or so. Copying from Unraid's NVME to Windows or Mac is still 3X faster than writing. Current screenshots attached - with the changes highlighted in Tips n Tweaks.

According to Tips n Tweaks, 'Disable NIC Flow Control?' was set to 'Yes' already. The results of 'ethtool eth0' is: Attached is a full screenshot of current Tips and Tweaks as well.

I forgot to mention, I was diligent in renaming files before each test so each system always saw that file as 'new'. I like the cache-only test, and I did that, sadly to no change in write performance at all. Attached are two screenshots. One is of the cache-only setting configuration, the second is of a brand-new file being copied to that share. Any other ideas to try?

I have a Cat6A connection from my Windows 11 desktop (running only NVMEs) to a 10GB switch, to Unraid. Should be 10GB all the way, and by all indications it is - because I can copy a file off the cache to Windows at a full 10G speeds. Writing a file to Unraid (well, an SMB share that uses the cache as primary) is slow. The fastest I've seen is roughly 240MB/s, but it's mostly below 200. I have only 1 cache drive on Unraid - a brand-new Samsung 9100 PRO 8TB NVME that has less than 200GB used. I've read through and made changes to my Windows NIC per this thread but I saw no change in behavior. I've made some SMB settings changes as well, but again, no change. (Current settings are in a screenshot attached.) Attached are my diagnostics and a few screenshots from Unraid. Some quick notes: Unraid is 7.2.3 - I've encountering no other issues and this is not a new behavior with this version. It's been like this for a while, I've just been too lazy to try and figure it out. My Unraid box is very capable. AMD EPYC 7763 on a Supermicro H12SSL-NT with 512GB of ram and 120TB of space. It's not the cabling - I tried a direct connection from my desktop to the switch, no change in behavior. I can write from my desktop to my M1 Mac Mini at a solid 10GB - no problems whatsoever. I can write to my desktop from both my Mac Mini and Unraid at a solid 10GB. My M1 Mac Mini is experiencing the same behavior. Reading from cache - fast. Writing to it? Slow. Any and all suggestions and guidance would be appreciated! biggs-diagnostics-20260121-2024.zip

Images in case if they help:

After further digging, my network is using a static IP address, and while I have all the other data correctly populated (gateway, etc) - the Docker IPv4 custom network interface br0 indicates that Gateway is null/blank. The only way I can get this to populate on the Docker settings page is by changing the Network IP address to Automatic instead of Static. Very odd. Once it's automatic, the Docker Settings br0 interface then has Gateway correctly filled in and the LMS docket has full access to the internet.

Is there any reason running this docker with a network type of Custom br0 (so I can set it to a specific IP different than my Unraid host) wouldn't get access to the internet? If I use that setting everything works fine internally, but the docker has no internet access. I can stream media already on my network to my devices on my network, but if I try to add (or stream) a podcast, get lyrics from a plugin, etc, it just times-out. This is what my log file sees on bootup when I set it to Custom: br0: No other device on my network has trouble accessing the internet, but I also have no other dockers set to Custom: br0 so perhaps I just overlooked something? Any ideas?