dlandon

I added some verbiage about setting the IP address to prevent conflicts in the plugin.

xfs and ext4 get mounted with 'discard'. There is no user settable Trim option. Click 'Help' on the UD page and read what it says about formatting disks and pre-cleared disks.

I'd like to hold a little bit before going live. I'd like a bit more time to think about the 'dirty' cache settings. The thing that bothers me is that some users will just crank up the settings thinking 'more is better'. I need to do some more research on the settings, but I think what might be nest are some fixed settings that pre-determine the values: 'Default' - 10, 20 (best for systems with VMs) 'Balance' - 5,80 (in between settings to offer best of both) 'Performance' - 50,80 (best for a lot of repeating, small file I/O) Anything higher that 'Default' will have some risk of data loss that has not been committed to disk. User must have a UPS.

Ok. All fixed in the next version. root@Tower:~# ethtool -g eth0 Ring parameters for eth0: Cannot get device ring settings: Operation not supported

Ok. Your NIC does not have flow control and I need to handle that differently so you don't get an error. I'll show "N/A" to indicate the NIC does not support flow control. I don't understand the ring buffers. Give me the output of this command: ethtool -g eth0

It looks like your NIC is having trouble with the TSO command. Go to a command line and tell me the output of this command: ethtool -a eth0 Also: /ethtool -k eth0

Sorry, typo in the link. Fixed now.

I've created a plugin to help in making these settings with some explanations to help with making settings. The plugin can be found in Community Applications or install by inserting the following in the install plugin. https://github.com/dlandon/tips.and.tweaks/raw/master/tips.and.tweaks.plg

See if this plugin win't help you identify the who/what is keeping files open. http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=42881.0

It is neither intended nor a bug. UD does nothing but mount the drive. It does nothing that I know of to hinder your server from sleeping.

Doesn't the service have to be enabled to run unbalance? SERVICE="enable"

I would love to get stuff out of my Go. I think this one (support for my Areca RAID card) probably won't meet plug-in criteria since it needs to install before emhttp is launched. Would be even better if LT would add this to 6.2 What we could do here is to set up a script dialog where you could enter custom commands in a script to be run when unraid is booted. I would probably set up the script where the script would only run on a reboot on an event before emhttp is run. i.e. the 'go' file is executed. Other tweaks would be applied whenever 'Apply' is hit in the gui and when unraid is started. I will do some research on the events, but I believe there is a services started, or something along those lines that is run before emhttp.

Ooooh, ooooh, ooooh, I feel a plugin coming! The programmer in me is restless right now! I will put together a plugin to allow setting the tweaks in the gui once we gather enough information on what the tweaks are, what they do, and suggestions on how they should be set. LT is highly discouraging any modifications to the 'go' file and a plugin could manage the settings outside the 'go' file. I will create some help text to help with making the settings, what can and should be done, etc. I'm open to other 'tweaks' and adjustments that make sense for this plugin. Any suggestions for the name of the plugin? 'tips.and.tweaks'.

Very nice! This collects the ideas that are spread around the forum that can be hard to find into one place.

I'm not seeing this.

Click on 'Help'.

I disagree there. Simply because they are still issues that the user has chosen to ignore for whatever reason. And if they are not put into the syslog, then any assistance the user is seeking via the forums will not have all of the relevant information. ie: a user is having issues accessing shares, but has chosen to ignore the fact that there is myShare and MyShare coexisting at the same time. I just don't want people completely turning off notifications simply because they have a valid use case (or completely disagree with) those warnings. If you still think that I'm wrong here, I'll make it optional to log the ignored issues. The choice is yours on how to handle this. I just thought if I choose to ignore an issue, it should not log any entries. The issue I have is with a Logitech Media Server Docker that was not configured to work properly as a dlna server because it will choose upnp ports based on what is available and I had to set the network to 'Host' to get it to work properly. I don't see it being fixed because Logitech is dropping their media players and it is not a good use of time to rework the Docker. I assumed when I asked for it to be ignored, it would not show up in the log. Another issue is that I developed a custom plugin I use for my particular situation that Community Applications would not know about. Maybe classify some issues as not critical and allow only those to be ignored. You know as well as I do that a person will choose to ignore an issue, not look at their log, and then ask for support. If you don't allow critical issues to be ignored, they continue to show and maybe then get the attention they deserve.

Issues that are set to ignored still put entries into the log. If they are ignored, there should not be any log entries.

The ntfs driver built into unraid is read only. UD installs the ntfs-3g driver that allows read and write access to ntfs mounted drives. Your ntfs drive should mount read/write and you should be able to write to it using UD. The problem I think you are having is that Windows mounted disks can be left in a state where Linux will not mount them read/write. UD tries to mount a ntfs disk read/write and if that fails, UD will mount it read only. This was done so disks could at least be read with UD and data moved off of them. If you look at the UD log, you will probably see an entry after UD tries to first mount your ntfs disk that it can only be mounted read only and then an entry after that where UD mounts the disk successfully read only. The solution to your problem is to get the data you want off the disk and re-format the disk with UD and then you can read/write on it with ntfs if that is your format of choice. As someone mentioned, if you want to move the disk back and forth to Windows, ntfs would be a good choice for the disk format. Remember that Windows may leave it again in a read/only mountable condition. This normally happens on a system disk where Windows has hibernated or on a Windows 10 system disk with fast boot enabled. Data disks should not have this condition. If the disk is to be left in unraid, I would use a format native to Linux. Because of its maturity, I am favoring XFS right now.

So can they be pinned to dockers or only vms after isolocpus I don't know. I've not tried.

The unRaid dashboard shows the paired CPUs.

This is exactly what I would expect in this situation where you are testing maximum speed. 8 cores will be faster than 4 cores with Hyperthreading. If the cores are being used by other processes, you will see a passmark decrease. In your first case, you were actually sharing the 4 cores with yourself.

There have been several posts on the forum about VM performance improvements by adjusting CPU pinning and assignments in cases of VMs stuttering on media playback and gaming. I've put together what I think is the best of those ideas. I don't necessarily think this is the total answer, but it has helped me with a particularly latency sensitive VM. Windows VM Configuration You need to have a well configured Windows VM in order to get any improvement with CPU pinning. Have your VM configured as follows: Set machine type to the latest i440fx.. Boot in OVMF and not seaBIOS for Windows 8 and Windows 10. Your GPU must support UEFI boot if you are doing GPU passthrough. Set Hyper-V to 'yes' unless you need it off for Nvidia GPUs. Don't initially assign more that 8 GB of memory and set 'Initial' and 'Max' memory at the same value so memory ballooning is off. Don't assign more than 4 CPUs total. Assign CPUs in pairs to your VM if it supports Hyperthreading. Be sure you are using the latest GPU driver. I have had issues with virtio network drivers newer than 0.1.100 on Windows 7. Try that driver first and then update once your VM is performing properly. Get the best performance you can by adjusting the memory and CPU settings. Don't over provision CPUs and memory. You may find that the performance will decrease. More is not always better. If you have more than 8GB of memory in your unRAID system, I also suggest installing the 'Tips and Tweaks' plugin and setting the 'Disk Cache' settings to the suggested values for VMs. Click the 'Help' button for the suggestions. Also set 'Disable NIC flow control' and 'Disable NIC offload' to 'Yes'. These settings are known to cause VM performance issues in some cases. You can always go back and change them later. Once you have your VM running correctly, you can then adjust CPU pinning to possibly improve the performance. Unless you have your VM configured as above, you will probably be wasting your time with CPU pinning. What is Hyperthreading? Hyper threading is a means to share one CPU core with multiple processes. The architecture of a hyperthread core is a core and two hyperthreads. It looks like this: HT ---- core ---- HT It is not a base core and a HT: core ---- HT When isolating CPUs, the best performance is gained by isolating and assigning both pairs for a VM, not just what some think as the '"core". Why Isolate and Assign CPUs Some VMs suffer from latency because of sharing the hyperthreaded cpus. The method I have described here helps with the latency caused by cpu sharing and context switching between hyperthreads. If you have a VM that is suffering from stuttering or pauses in media playback or gaming, this procedure may help. Don't assign more cpus to a VM that has latency issues. That is generally not the issue. I also don't recommend assigning more than 4 cpus to a VM. I don't know why any VM needs that kind of horsepower. In my case I have a Xeon 4 core processor with Hyperthreading. The CPU layout is: 0,4 1,5 2,6 3,7 The Hyperthread pairs are (0,4) (1,5) (2,6) and (3,7). This means that one core is used for two Hyperthreads. When assigning CPUs to a high performance VM, CPUs should be assigned in Hyperthread pairs. I isolated some CPUs to be used by the VM from Linux with the following in the syslinux configuration on the flash drive: append isolcpus=2,3,6,7 initrd=/bzroot This tells Linux that the physical CPUs 2,3,6 and 7 are not to be managed or used by Linux. There is an additional setting for vcpus called 'emulatorpin'. The 'emulatorpin' entry puts the emulator tasks on other CPUs and off the VM CPUs. I then assigned the isolated CPUs to my VM and added the 'emulatorpin': <cputune> <vcpupin vcpu='0' cpuset='2'/> <vcpupin vcpu='1' cpuset='3'/> <vcpupin vcpu='2' cpuset='6'/> <vcpupin vcpu='3' cpuset='7'/> <emulatorpin cpuset='0,4'/> </cputune> What ends up happening is that the 4 logical CPUs (2,3,6,7) are not used by Linux but are available to assign to VMs. I then assigned them to the VM and pinned emulator tasks to CPUs (0,4). This is the first CPU pair. Linux tends to favor the low numbered CPUs. Make your CPU assignments in the VM editor and then edit the xml and add the emulatorpin assignment. Don't change any other CPU settings in the xml. I've seen recommendations to change the topology: <cpu mode='host-passthrough'> <topology sockets='1' cores='2' threads='2'/> </cpu> Don't make any changes to this setting. The VM manager does it appropriately. There is no advantage in making changes and it can cause problems like a VM that crashes. This has greatly improved the performance of my Windows 7 Media Center VM serving Media Center Extenders. I am not a KVM expert and this may not be the best way to do this, but in reading some forum posts and searching the internet, this is the best I've found so far. I would like to see LT offer some performance tuning settings in the VM manager that would help with these settings to improve performance in a VM without all the gyrations I've done here to get the performance I need in my VM. They could at least offer some 'emulatorpin' settings. Note: I still see confusion about physical CPUs, vcpus, and hyperthreaded pairs. CPU pairs like 3,7 are two threads that share a core. It is not a core with a hyperthread. When isolating and assigning CPUs to a VM, do it in pairs. Don't isolate and assign one (3) and not its pair (7) unless you don't assign 7 to any other VM. This is not going to give you what you want. vcpus are relative to the VM only. You don't isolate vcpus, you isolate physical CPUs that are then assigned to VM vcpus.

Just checking one thing, the messages above are for sdc1, is that hard coded? The drive symbols can change between boots, even more likely after OS updates. It's always best to refer to the drive by something more permanent than its drive symbol. But ignore me if I'm off-base! Correct. They can change. UD uses the drive serial number to look up the device. It was sdc at the time correct? If not, that is a problem.

I used this plugin to move data off a drive to free it up for a second parity disk for 6.2. Worked well, but found one minor issue. When a source share is empty, it fails and says there is not enough free space on the destination. With the way unraid spreads shares across disks, this could be a common issue. An empty source should be ignored.