When moving files to my unraid server from another machine, my write speeds have become what  I would consider to be unacceptable based on experience.  I am now writing at about 2-3MBp/s.  Previously I was writing at 10-15MBp/s.

 

Similarly, when unraring to my unraid server the speed is about 2-3MBp/s.

 

Worse, when unraring from one directory to another on my unraid server, the speed is also extremely slow (ie., 40 minutes to unrar an 8gb MKV file).  I have tried unraring from one disk to another, to the same disk, and the speed seems about the same.

 

Basically the only change I've made recently is to install some addons such as unraid-web and rutorrent.  I can't imagine they have anything to do with this drastic decrease in speed.

 

I'm not really sure where to start in checking for problems.  I did reboot with no effect.  I was just wondering if someone could possibly point me in the right direction in terms of steps I should take to troubleshoot this problem ie., running reports or what not.

 

Thanks!

You probably need to post your syslog, so please see the Troubleshooting link in my sig.

Of course, sorry.

 

http://pastebin.com/FNT8Spkf

 

Syslog since yesterday's reboot.

By any chance are you unraring zipped files which have a lot of small files too?You mentioned about unraring a movie file too, perhaps you might of have very small files in the mix? Also has your LAN configuration changed recently. Server connected to a different port of a Router/switch? I had a brief look at the syslog file, some errors about some files could not found, it could be an addon slowing down your server too.

There are small issues, but I don't see anything major that would account for such terrible speeds.  Just to confirm, were there any of these very slow transfers made during the period covered by this syslog?

 

The connection to the parity drive is not optimal, which will hurt performance somewhat.  It appears you have an ICH4-based board, which is somewhat old, and only provides the PCI bus, at apparently 33MHz.  4 of your 6 drives are connected to a SiI3114 chipset on the PCI bus, and your gigabit network card is also on the PCI bus, and that is certainly going to be a bottleneck.  You have 2 more drives connected to the motherboard SATA ports.  I would strongly suggest that you reconnect the parity drive to one of the motherboard ports, so that at least the parity drive traffic can be moved off the PCI bus.  Just swap its SATA cable connection with one of the onboard connected drives (Disk 3 or Disk 4).  I *think* that should improve performance a little, but certainly does not explain getting only 2-3MB/s.  Before you swap the cables, note the current drive assignments on the Devices tab, then when you reboot, if the array does not automatically start up, go back to the Devices page and ensure they are still assigned correctly.

 

There do appear to be some small addon-related issues, but I don't how they could be related to the drive performance.  For example, you have an UnMENU conf file that needs to be cleaned out, which is causing the harmless SetDriveValue warnings at the end of the syslog.

By any chance are you unraring zipped files which have a lot of small files too?You mentioned about unraring a movie file too, perhaps you might of have very small files in the mix? Also has your LAN configuration changed recently. Server connected to a different port of a Router/switch? I had a brief look at the syslog file, some errors about some files could not found, it could be an addon slowing down your server too.

 

Nope, no small files.  I've tried a few different rar sets, most of which contain either a mkv movie (8-12 gigs) or a tv show (1-2 gigs) with the same results.  My lan configuration changed a few weeks ago but things were working fine in the meantime.  I was getting the usual speeds copying from (50-60 MB/s) and unraring to (10-12MB/s).  Really the only thing to change are the addons, but unraid-web and rutorrent aren't set to re-install on reboot, i have to install them manually so yesterday when I rebooted I tested before those installs and the speeds were also junk.

There are small issues, but I don't see anything major that would account for such terrible speeds.  Just to confirm, were there any of these very slow transfers made during the period covered by this syslog?

 

The connection to the parity drive is not optimal, which will hurt performance somewhat.  It appears you have an ICH4-based board, which is somewhat old, and only provides the PCI bus, at apparently 33MHz.  4 of your 6 drives are connected to a SiI3114 chipset on the PCI bus, and your gigabit network card is also on the PCI bus, and that is certainly going to be a bottleneck.  You have 2 more drives connected to the motherboard SATA ports.  I would strongly suggest that you reconnect the parity drive to one of the motherboard ports, so that at least the parity drive traffic can be moved off the PCI bus.  Just swap its SATA cable connection with one of the onboard connected drives (Disk 3 or Disk 4).  I *think* that should improve performance a little, but certainly does not explain getting only 2-3MB/s.  Before you swap the cables, note the current drive assignments on the Devices tab, then when you reboot, if the array does not automatically start up, go back to the Devices page and ensure they are still assigned correctly.

 

There do appear to be some small addon-related issues, but I don't how they could be related to the drive performance.  For example, you have an UnMENU conf file that needs to be cleaned out, which is causing the harmless SetDriveValue warnings at the end of the syslog.

 

Correct on your first point, that syslog covers from my reboot yesterday to now, and I'm still getting awful speeds (I'm looking at an unrar right now which is 2.5MB/s).

 

I can do the device swapping, I think what you've suggested makes sense to move the parity drive to the onboard port.  But, nothing has changed in that regard in the last couple of weeks so I can't imagine it would make that drastic a difference.

 

Is there a way to uninstall all addons to see if that makes a difference?

If you've installed the addons via unmenu, you can disable them by setting them to not startup upon next reboot. If you've manually installed the addons, I'd say most likely you'd have to look at the 'go' file and place a # symbol in front of the line you wish not to execute at startup. Copy and paste the original go (/boot/config directory) file before amending it so if you accidently delete or do something to it preventing your server to start, you can roll back to your original setup. ThY is the only way I know on disabling any addons that you have on your server.

I just commented out the auto install of both unmenu and any custom packages in my GO script, rebooted, and tested speeds which were still just downright awful.  I guess it doesn't have anything to do with the packages.  I wonder what else could have possibly degraded the performance so badly.

 

I will try moving it to another network jack tomorrow just in case, but I don't think that would help because internal unrar times seem to be really poor as well.

 

Is there some test to run to see if the processor is being overwhelmed somehow?  It's a fairly beefy 3.2GHz P4 with hyperthreading so I can't imagine that's the case but it's the only other thing I can think of.

One more shot in the dark.

 

When I load up uNmenu's "My Main" and click on the Smart inventory, I see that one of my drive (the lone Samsung) has:

 

» calibration_retry_count=3

 

listed under "add'l issues/failures".

 

This doesn't seem to be serious, but it led me to look at the samsung reference in the bootup of the syslog which shows it as UDMA7 as opposed to UDMA100/133

 

Apr 20 22:11:19 Jewnas kernel: ata3.00: ATA-7: SAMSUNG HD753LJ, 1AA01107, max UDMA7

Apr 20 22:11:19 Jewnas kernel: ata3.00: 1465149168 sectors, multi 16: LBA48 NCQ (depth 0/32)

Apr 20 22:11:19 Jewnas kernel: ata3.00: configured for UDMA/10

 

I don't know if this is a problem or if it could be having an effect on other drives performance but thought I'd throw it in here just in case...

Ok, one more piece of confusing information before bed.

 

I am running a parity check (kind of by accident) but I thought I'd peak into the disk usage using bwm.  This is what's going on:

http://pastebin.ca/1871070

 

Seems like a reasonable total speed to me... More confusion.

Still no luck here.  I moved the box to another network port and I'm still experiencing really poor speeds.  To sum up:

 

Copying from Windows->Unraid is REALLY slow (2-3MB/s).  Previously it had been 10-13MB/s

Copying from Unraid->Windows is REALLY slow (10-12MB/s).  Previously it had been 50-60MB/s.  My switch is capable of doing 90+MB/s (copying windows->windows)

Unraring from Windows->Unraid is REALLY slow (similar to copying speed)

Unraring from Unraid->Unraid is pretty slow.  I have tried Unraring from one disk to itself, and one disk to another disk (in different combinations of disks).  None of that seems to matter.  Using "time unrar e blah.rar" I get results like:

1.09 GB (1,174,142,951 bytes)

real    3m25.273s

user    0m6.210s

sys    0m9.190s

 

I never timed things before, but it used to take about a minute per gig to unrar (8gb unrar would be about 8 minutes).

 

For a larger sample, on a different drive I got:

 

7.95 GB (8,540,608,478 bytes)

real    14m45.707s

user    0m46.490s

sys    0m29.040s

 

Lastly, COPYING from Unraid->Unraid is FINE.  An example is:

Generation.Kill.S01E01.mkv

sent 2347888038 bytes  received 31 bytes  17854662.12 bytes/sec

being copied from one drive to another.

 

I have posted a log from a fresh reboot here: http://pastebin.com/7qvenfgJ in case that is of any help.

 

This is extremely frustrating, especially because everything was working fine until a few days ago.  The only change I've made is offloading torrenting duties to my unraid box rather than windows.  That being said, I've rebooted without untorrent and there is no change in performance.

 

I would really appreciate some help in troubleshooting potential solutions.

bump.. anyone?

Just out of interest, are you using the same Windows client for you file transfer speed testing that you use to use for your original file transfers in the past, before this promlwm occurred? Also is their a device that you recently plugged into your networking device which if perhaps slowed down your networking device to a crawl?

Yep, same client (I have tested with multiple clients) and nothing new on the router at all.  Other clients on the router have no problem transferring at full gigabit speeds.\

When you run 'ethtool eth0' assuming eth0 is the NIC in question on your server via puTTY or on the actual server itself, what information does it give you? Can you post it? Thanks.

Supported ports: [ TP ]

        Supported link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full

                                100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full

                                1000baseT/Full

        Supports auto-negotiation: Yes

        Advertised link modes:  10baseT/Half 10baseT/Full

                                100baseT/Half 100baseT/Full

                                1000baseT/Full

        Advertised auto-negotiation: Yes

        Speed: 1000Mb/s

        Duplex: Full

        Port: Twisted Pair

        PHYAD: 0

        Transceiver: internal

        Auto-negotiation: on

        Supports Wake-on: umbg

        Wake-on: g

        Current message level: 0x00000007 (7)

        Link detected: yes

 

Try a straight patch lead for guest to server, using static ip and using a cat6 or 5e cable and see then.

 

 

Just tried connecting my laptop directly to my unraid server, and the speed is about twice as fast but still disappointingly slow (~23MB/s).

 

As a reminder, my two windows machines can transfer at about 60MB/s.

 

I also tried downgrading my unraid to 4.5.1.  No luck (as I expected).

As a reminder, your two windows machines are not copies to Parity Protected Arrays.

 

The copy speed is only comparable if you're copying to non-Parity Protected Array.

Understood, but read speeds (from unraid to windows) are significantly lower than I would expect based on past experience.

just a shot in the dark but do you have the malwarebytes v1.45 program with the "Website Blocking" option selected? i fought a similar issue in the past 2 days because my computer would not transfer/receive anywhere over 8M using the file copy or ftp. i even bought another intel pci-e nic and reformatted my entire machine but just after i installed the malwarebytes prog it started doing the same thing. once i changed this option i am getting 30-50M.

 

thanks

James

Thanks for the suggestion, but I do not have malwarebytes installed.  I am able to transfer between other machines at Gigabit speeds, the problem definitely seems isolated to the unraid box.

Well, foolishly I spent $20 on a new gigabit network card with a different chipset to see if that could be a problem.  No dice, same speeds.

 

Any other suggestions/tips would be appreciated.

You have tried a totally different patch lead which is a certified CAT6 cable connected to your server have you? Also I would backup your USB drive (copy the entire 'config' folder under /boot) format your drive and prepare it like a new server build. Once this is operational, copy back the 'config' folder from your backup onto your newly prepared working USB drive that you made, reboot and try again to see if the speeds have improved. If still no go, start again in repreparing the USB drive once more, but only copying the licence file back, try again. If you're getting the same result in networking speed then I'm all but lost. The aim I'm my solution is to see if a fresh build of unraid remedies the issue it seems to be something dodgy with your current OS. Take care while doing what I've suggested and refer to the wiki if you're uncertain on preparing your USB drive or starting the array again.