Unraid GUI / Docker / VM responsiveness issues after migrating to Dell R730

Hi,

I recently migrated my Unraid server from a Ryzen desktop system to a Dell PowerEdge R730, and since then the system feels noticeably less responsive overall.

Symptoms

• Unraid web GUI feels sluggish/intermittently laggy

• Browser often shows:

  • “Waiting for 10.10.0.250”

• WordPress Docker container feels slow/sluggish

• VM creation in Unraid GUI feels slow

• Windows 11 VM GUI sometimes stutters/hitches

• Overall responsiveness feels inconsistent compared to previous hardware

Hardware

Server

• Dell PowerEdge R730

CPUs

• 2x Intel Xeon E5-2630L v4

• 20 cores / 40 threads total

RAM

• 128 GB RAM

Cache / VM Storage

• Samsung 990 PRO 2TB NVMe SSD

• Connected at PCIe Gen3 x4

• Used for cache pool + VM storage

Array

• 4x 2.7TB HDDs

NICs

Integrated:

• Broadcom BCM5720 Gigabit NICs

Additional:

• Intel 82599ES 10GbE NIC not in use at the moment

Current Unraid Version

Linux 6.18.29-Unraid

Current Findings

CPU Governor

The system was initially running with:

schedutil

I manually switched all CPUs to:

performance

using:

for cpu in /sys/devices/system/cpu/cpu*/cpufreq/scaling_governor; do echo performance > $cpu; done

This slightly improved responsiveness.

Dell BIOS Power Profile

Current BIOS profile:

Performance Per Watt (OS)

Storage Performance

VMs are running on the Samsung 990 PRO NVMe SSD, so storage should not be the bottleneck.

Localhost curl response appears fast:

curl -o /dev/null -s -w '%{time_connect} %{time_starttransfer} %{time_total}\n' http://localhost

Result:

0.000425 0.043714 0.043811

Network / NIC Details

Management interface currently uses a Broadcom BCM5720 NIC with the tg3 driver.

ethtool -i eth0:

driver: tg3
firmware-version: FFV22.00.6 bc 5720-v1.39

ethtool -c eth0:

rx-usecs: 20
tx-usecs: 72

I suspect the Broadcom tg3 NIC / interrupt moderation / latency may be contributing to the sluggishness.

System Information

CPU

Intel(R) Xeon(R) CPU E5-2630L v4 @ 1.80GHz
2 sockets
20 cores / 40 threads

Memory

125Gi total RAM

Storage Layout

Samsung 990 PRO 2TB NVMe mounted as cache pool
4x 2.7TB HDD array

Questions

• Is this known behavior with Dell R730 + Broadcom BCM5720 (tg3) NICs?

• Could tg3 interrupt moderation affect Unraid GUI responsiveness?

• Would moving management/network traffic to the Intel 82599ES NIC likely help?

• Are there recommended BIOS settings for Dell enterprise hardware running Unraid?

• Any recommended tweaks for improving UI/network responsiveness on dual Xeon systems?

Thanks!

fat-phoque-diagnostics-20260526-1229.zip

Edited May 26May 26 by Wout_van_der_Aa