SMB Slowness driving me to new solution

[petebnas]

Hi all..I've been using unraid forever as a HTPC target, Music/Video source, various unstructured data, etc.  It's always worked well for me, but lately I've been driven crazy trying to sort out slowness issues with my windows client machines hanging and doing all sorts of funny things.  I've been forced into spending hours trying to get apps to work differently so they won't try a lot of 'small file/quick access' tasks like reading cover art and whatever else, and I really have reached that point where I need to find another win-based solution for file access.   

 

I ran across some other folks with similar issues that spent even more time that I have, and besides playing around with RSS (which i've done) and chasing things with hardware, it seems like unraid has some smb access issues, or perhaps it's samba...regardless, it's 2023 and I don't feel like messing around with samba problems.

 

I'll probably keep unraid running as a backup target, but don't need any docker tricks and just need something for my primary access that will be quick with small files like jpg cover art files, music, and music video collections.  

 

Has anyone been down this path recently? With large drives being so cheap, my thought was to keep my primary data online with a windows box, backing up to unraid and also leaving unraid for very large video files like movie files, etc...which have always worked well...and obviously some of these are accessed via NFS and bypass the issues I see with my other clients.  

 

I want to be clear...I've been nothing but satisfied with Unraid over the years..but I get this feeling that there's some underlying issues that aren't being addressed, and I'm not quite sure why.  I do know that when I'm spending hours packet capturing and trying to get my apps to do things differently to stay afloat, that it's not something I want to be doing!

 

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Pete

[NeverDeleteSomething]

Hi Pete,

I feel the same way you do. I bought 2 licenses after being convinced by the functionality of the trial version and have been using Unraid for about 2 years now. So far I still deployed the fileservices here at home with a Windows Server VM on Unraid. But since I had to use more and more tricks to fulfill my usecases, I wanted to finally migrate to Unraid 2-3 weeks ago. After all, this is the core functionality of Unraid (I thought). 

I then pretty quickly became aware of the problem you mentioned and, like you, first started the problem analysis myself. 
Shortly thereafter, I came across various forum posts with much more in-depth analysis, which described exactly my problem and are over 3 YEARS old.

 

For me, Unraid is thus actually dead as NAS. I have some directories with 30,000+ files and the whole handling is a disaster and felt even worse than it describe some here.

Of course I could continue to run my existing setup with the Windows VM (and will for now).  But actually that's exactly what I didn't want.

 

The worst thing about it is that Limetech more or less ignores the problem. One of the main functions of a NAS is practically unusable and totally buggy, which in combination with Limetech's inaction makes me question the whole product. If there would at least be a statement like "It's complicated but we're working on it and expect a solution by xx/2023".

And if they found out after the analysis that they can NOT fix the problem, they would have to drop their pants in my view and maybe mention in the release notes under Known Errors that the NAS / SMB performance with many small files is a complete disaster.
The whole workarounds are, as you said, nothing you want to bother with and do not help in many use cases.

 

A statement from @limetech would be desirable. 

Should there already be one, I would be grateful for a link.

[petebnas]

I moved on and put most of my files on my primary windows workstation and shared it out, and that made a huge difference for my network clients.  My throughput soared for the things that were lagging prior, and I started to notice other things were a lot better.  For example, just opening up directories of photos now populate the thumbnails almost instantly, instead of me sitting there waiting for them to slowly pop up one by one.  When you have a few hundred photos in each folder and you're trying to find something in a hurry, it's a lot easier now.    I still use unraid for some movie archives, since my client is also linux so they can chat back and forth via NFS and the access time isn't really an issue.  I also use it for backups, since I can kick off a manual or automatically scheduled sync and don't really care when it finishes.  However, I've had recurring issues with a drive just dropping from the array (red x) when the array goes to shutdown...it doesn't matter what card I have it on, what channel of the card, I've swapped drives, I've swapped bays, it just seems to always pop up someplace on the array.  This may have to do with the Marvell chipset, but I don't want to keep dumping money into hardware and hoping it fixes things.  Ultimately I'll probably wait until drive prices come down and keep it online and expand my cloud backup solution.  But I agree, ultimately without some idea of whether this is a solveable issue or nonsolvable, and if solveable, when.... that doesn't sit real well .  I've got my money's worth with the product, so I'm not in quite the same position, but after wrestling with it for a while, I started to realize I didn't want to be spending my non-work hours figuring this out nonstop..

 

Pete

Edited April 6, 2023 by petebnas

[PandaCheese]

From what I remember SMB performance with many files wasn't always this bad. I came to unRAID from WHS, and for the first couple of years browsing performance was at least on par with that. Unfortunately I cannot recall the exact version that introduced the slowness, but to me it was within the last year that it became unbearable. Wonder if there's some hidden threshold you have to cross, like the total number of files or something.

[tezgno]

I was having a lot of problems with performance in my environment until very recently. I couldn't quite put a finger on when I started noticing things getting really bad but it was definitely getting worse over the past year. Then, a couple of days ago, I stumbled upon some things that helped me to resolve my slowness problem on Mac. Essentially, for the past several years the performance of SMB has gotten worse and with most of us trying to tinker with settings to improve performance, which many of us did, it would seem that around last year, limetech actually decided to work on improved settings for SMB... which after looking at this post here, caused me to figure out that all of my settings and changes combined with their settings and changes was actually the culprit. And, interestingly enough, that was around the time that I started to notice performance getting really bad for me. The fix for me was to remove all of my SMB extra settings completely, copy the fruit conf file that is in the post, add my appropriate changes that I wanted to be default, removed the ones that they explicitly state shouldn't be working, and restarted samba. When I tell you performance was night and day, it would be an understatement. To confirm that was the issue, I undid everything and put it back to what it was before and sure enough, performance tanked. To put into perspective, what would take only a few seconds to copy on my 10gb network was taking hours. Now, things are back to taking seconds.

 

My advice would be that if you have made your own settings changes to unRAID over the years in order to improve performance, especially in the smb extras files, if you are running 6.11 or newer, you may want to re-evaluate your settings against the default, as you may be inadvertently negating options designed to improve performance from some of the changes put in. That is what was happening to myself.

[petebnas]

I've read this a few times but am not quite following... I don't have any fruit settings currently, but you're saying you have to enable it and use a specific file they reccomend?  ...or just downgrade to 6.9.2?

Edited May 19, 2023 by petebnas

[dam448]

Just finished to fully read this thread.

 

SMB is a main issue apparently well known on the forum for a few years now and things are not going better with time.

Unfortunately, I discovered it two weeks ago as I started to migrate from a QNAP device to an unRAID DIY server.

 

Tried many settings, tricks, tips and nothing works set apart "Disk Share".

But that's not a solution. We avoid the main problem.

 

Disgusted.

 

One last thing to try.

Downgrade to an older version to see if the problem remains the same. (Started with 6.11.5 then 6.11.0)

Where can I find version 6.9.2 ?

 

[Nano]

On 3/8/2023 at 11:50 PM, petebnas said:

Hi all..I've been using unraid forever as a HTPC target, Music/Video source, various unstructured data, etc.  It's always worked well for me, but lately I've been driven crazy trying to sort out slowness issues with my windows client machines hanging and doing all sorts of funny things.  I've been forced into spending hours trying to get apps to work differently so they won't try a lot of 'small file/quick access' tasks like reading cover art and whatever else, and I really have reached that point where I need to find another win-based solution for file access.   

 

I ran across some other folks with similar issues that spent even more time that I have, and besides playing around with RSS (which i've done) and chasing things with hardware, it seems like unraid has some smb access issues, or perhaps it's samba...regardless, it's 2023 and I don't feel like messing around with samba problems.

 

I'll probably keep unraid running as a backup target, but don't need any docker tricks and just need something for my primary access that will be quick with small files like jpg cover art files, music, and music video collections.  

 

Has anyone been down this path recently? With large drives being so cheap, my thought was to keep my primary data online with a windows box, backing up to unraid and also leaving unraid for very large video files like movie files, etc...which have always worked well...and obviously some of these are accessed via NFS and bypass the issues I see with my other clients.  

 

I want to be clear...I've been nothing but satisfied with Unraid over the years..but I get this feeling that there's some underlying issues that aren't being addressed, and I'm not quite sure why.  I do know that when I'm spending hours packet capturing and trying to get my apps to do things differently to stay afloat, that it's not something I want to be doing!

 

Any thoughts are appreciated.

Pete

After some checking, NFS fixes these painful issues, feel free to try my guide here. Over 3 times quicker via NFS.

 

Edited July 29, 2023 by Nano