April 21, 201610 yr I'm on 6.2.0-beta21, but I may have seen something similar on an earlier build. I'm doing some large copying (mostly large files) from WS to unRAID (no parity) and initially the transfers go at >100MB/sec. Last night I copied 400GB and the network throughput was very good. Then suddenly, in the middle of the copy job, throughput went to crap, dropping to 10-20 MB/sec. I stopped the copy and did some testing with a large file from my local SSD to unRAID, and the speed remained slow. I rebooted unRAID and the problem persisted. It was only when rebooting the workstation that the problem went away and I was aback at >100MB/sec again. Restarted the copy job and after about 20 minutes at high speed, it went to crap again. Restart unRAID had no effect, but restarting the workstation fixed it (again). This is 100% repeatable. I tried different cables, a different hub, removed smb-extra.conf .... nothing worked.
April 21, 201610 yr Author FWIW, I tested FTP and HTTP transfers, and they continue to copy at full expected speed. Only SMB is affected AFAICT.
April 23, 201610 yr Author I may have found the fix. It is a configuration option on the Workstation NIC: Large Send Offload. On my Intel 82579V GigE NIC, the option under Advanced Options of "Large Send Offload Version 2 (IPv4)" was set to enabled. I changed it to disabled and rebooted. Been good as gold since then.
April 24, 201610 yr Note to others: you might also want to disable "Large Send Offload Version 2 (IPv6)" too. Your PC will disconnect from the network momentarily after the setting change. The option is under "Configure" button under adapter properties (see screenshot). Some more information on why you might want to disable LSO: Link Apparently it says Intel adapter is one of the worst offender.
April 26, 201610 yr Didn't seem to correct my situation - I'll do some more testing tonight though. Graphs look the same as my initial post. I'll try to watch both the windows network speed in the VM and the server memory and disk usage at the same time, and see how it goes... at least this is a path to try. ... thanks, cheers.
June 10, 201610 yr Due to bubbaQ's discovery, I created a 'tip' for it on the Tips and Tweaks wiki page, and Dan added it to the Tips and Tweaks plugin. It appears to only affect certain NIC's that have execution offload capabilities, primarily Intel NIC's. The behavior is typical, on boot all networking is fine, but occasionally during large file transfers, network speed will suddenly drop dramatically (doesn't stop though, just much slower). It can only be restored by rebooting. I don't know whether disabling offload should be automatically set in unRAID, probably need more testing, but there are numerous reports online where it helped (not just an unRAID issue).
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