Slow performance of small files over SMB

[maoravni]

I've suspected this for quite a while, so I conducted a small test.

I took a folder with ~95K files, ~24GB and copied to and from my Unraid server and to and from an old NAS I have.

 

The Unraid server has AMD Ryzen 5 5600G, 16GB RAM. I also have an NVME cache drive.

The old NAS has Atom D525, 4GB RAM, and 5 3TB drives, running latest OpenMediaVault.

All machines are connected to the same switch, 1GB ethernet.

The source machine is an Intel I7 6700T with a SATA SSD.

 

I copied the files to the NAS, to the Unraid server using the standard shares, where the files will be stored on the cache drive, and to the Unraid server to a direct share to cache drive.

 

The copy operation was performed with Robocopy using 4 threads.

 

Times:

Local -> Unraid user share: 23m

Local -> Old NAS: 19m

Local -> Unraid direct share: 6m

 

Unraid user share -> Local: 10m

Old NAS -> Local: 8m

Unraid direct share -> Local: 6m

 

This explains why I get so low performance running applications that store data directly on the network shares.

I know that Unraid adds latency to network operations because of shfs, and I don't expect write operations to be as fast as RAID-5, and that's why I added the NVME drive, but I didn't expect this.

 

Is there any way to reduce the latency (that does not include direct mounting, as that defeats the purpose) ?

[JorgeB]

You can use exclusive shares, for data that resides only on a pool, for the array, the best hope is when Unraid starts using kernel 6.9+, it includes FUSE pass through that is supposed to help a lot with this.

[maoravni]

So that means I can't use the cache NVME and the entire data for the share must occupy a single drive of my array?

So I get slow write performance AND I have to manage my data, which I thought I could skip on Unraid?

 

[JorgeB]

9 minutes ago, maoravni said:

So that means I can't use the cache NVME and the entire data for the share must occupy a single drive of my array?

Exclusive shares only work with pools, you can also use disk shares (for single array disk and/or pools), or user shares with slower performance, at least for now.