Very slow user share read performances

[FrankG]

Looking for help improving user share read performances.

 

I Noticed read perfromances issues in this fresh new unraid installation. Listing the content of a user share is much slower then reading the content of the disk share containg the data. The array has 1 parity disk and 3 data disks. I did not configure a cache disk yet.  System is dual xeon E5-2660 with 64gb ram and is mostly idle and unused.

 

The test is done on a the unraid server cli interface with a share folder containing 56k files for a total of 44gb. 

 

Here is some test comparing the user and disk performance. The command used for tests is : "time du -h ." and was executed twice for each test to allow for system caching.

 

root@Vault:/mnt/user/Archives/emy# time du -h .

[...]

44G     .

real    0m13.703s
user    0m0.285s
sys     0m2.161s

 

The result on the disk containing all the data : 

root@Vault:/mnt/disk3/Archives/emy# time du -h .

[...]

44G     .

real    0m0.221s
user    0m0.079s
sys     0m0.140s

 

I tried installing the "Dynamix Cache Directories" plugin and did not see any improvement. 

 

Is there someting I forgot to configure in the system or any idea on optimization settings I could try? 

[JorgeB]

It will never be as fast as a disk share but try disabling mitigations:

 

 

[FrankG]

Using the "Disable security mitigations" pluging did help a little bit on the performances. I have measured an improvement of 15%. 

I feel that confirms the issue is with the CPU algorithms and not the disks.

 

I am still open to suggestions but I have the feeling this will be the unraid system performances and not much can be done to improve. 

[FrankG]

Update : 

Tried with the Btrfs and got the same results. 

Tried with a hardware raid, single vdisk in unraid (no parity nothing) and got the same results. 

 

Found out this thread : https://www.reddit.com/r/unRAID/comments/t1m15r/unraid_is_terrible_for_users_with_tons_of_files/ and figured the issue is in the core of Unraid with the FUSE system and there is not much that can be done to improve. I feel even the upcoming Raidz will not solve this read performance issue. 

 

This is sad as I realy like the Unraid docker system, but I feel I will never have good user share performances for my needs. 

 

Edited November 10, 2022 by FrankG

[JorgeB]

User shares will always have a performance penalty, usually less noticeable with a CPU with good single thread performance, multi thread not important for this.