[SOLVED] New Unraid server - LAN is fast, internet upstream is slow

[chiamone]

I just set up my first Unraid server (6.5) and everything went swimmingly, except for this one bit. The internet speed, specifically the upstream, is quite slow. Let me lay this out.

 

I have a Win10 pc sitting next to the Unraid server, they are both connected to the router via in-wall wiring. All cat 5e wiring. 

Windows speed test is 400Mbs down/200Mbs up. Unraid is ~300Mbs down/30-40Mbs up. That upstream speed is painful.

All test were done with dockers and vms disabled.

File transfers between the two via SMB are a sustained 100MB/s+ in either direction so it appears I'm getting full Gigabit LAN speeds, which is supported by link lights and the dashboard.

 

I've tried swapping the cables between the two, using a different static IP address, disabling bonding since there's just the one NIC anyway, all with identical results on both machines.

 

I'm at the end of my limited expertise. Would any of you kind folks have any suggestions as to what I should try next?

 

The NIC is an onboard  Realtek RTL8111H.

 

Thanks for any help!

thefifth-diagnostics-20180420-2252.zip

[Frank1940]

You have an unRAID server connected to the Internet?  If so, how?  It is generally recommended that one not do so unless you are using a vpn or some other sort of 'harden' interface.

 

IT would be useful; if you were to describe in more detail exactly what the Internet setup is and why you need such speeds.  

[John_M]

1 hour ago, Frank1940 said:

You have an unRAID server connected to the Internet?

 

Doesn't almost everyone? He didn't say it wasn't behind a firewall.

[chiamone]

John_M has the right of it. I would think this is quite common. Both pc's are connected directly to a Netgear R6300, which has a firewall, and is in turn connected to the fiber modem.

 

The most immediate reason is that I have about 5.5TB of media files I like to keep backed up to the cloud. Since I'm switching to rclone to push the data up I have to push it all up again since it uses different encryption. I would like this to take days rather than weeks.

 

Additionally one of the primary purposes of this is to run a Plex server. I would like to be able to stream more than one high quality video should the need arise.

 

Besides it should just, by my estimation, be faster and I'd like to know why it isn't.

 

Thanks! 

[Frank1940]

So the transfer between those two computers on the LAN (Win10 and unRAID) is 100MB/s.   And the Win10 computer WAN upload speed is 200Mb/s while the unRAID server can only manage 30Mb/s.  I would start looking at things like MTU size and other issues. 

 

Plus, have you actually tested to see what a 'real' data transfer speed is?  Have you considered maybe using the WIN10 machine to read the file on the server and send it to the cloud based server? 

[chiamone]

52 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

using the WIN10 machine to read the file on the server and send it to the cloud based server? 

 

I just tried this and got 160Mb/s average on a 9GB file.

 

55 minutes ago, Frank1940 said:

I would start looking at things like MTU size

 

I wouldn't expect MTU size to account for 4-5x decrease in speed but I'll play with it and see what comes about.

 

Thanks for the suggestions Frank!

[remotevisitor]

What is the processing power of your Unraid box compared to your windows 10 box?

 

I assume that whatever software that is sending it to the cloud server is doing it securely and encrypting it which might account for the different speeds if there is a significant difference in processing power and/or efficiency of the encryption software on the 2 systems.

[chiamone]

19 minutes ago, remotevisitor said:

What is the processing power of your Unraid box compared to your windows 10 box?

 

I assume that whatever software that is sending it to the cloud server is doing it securely and encrypting it which might account for the different speeds if there is a significant difference in processing power and/or efficiency of the encryption software on the 2 systems.

 

the unraid cpu is certainly slower, about 5000 vs 15000 passmarks. However the CPU load never goes over 15% when uploading via rclone. Also I get similar speeds when doing a simple speed test on the server. It doesn't seem to me that this is the problem. Thanks for the idea!

[chiamone]

I think I've got this figured. Digging through the rclone site it talks about how the files are broken into ~100M chunks and each chunk is transferred via a separate TCP connection. By default rclone will transfer 4 chunks simultaneously. Sometimes these connections are limited in bandwidth per connection. So I upped the number of chunks from 4 to 16 (--transfers 16) and now I'm getting right about 160Mb/s just like on Windows. The Windows client I'm using must do this automatically. Yay!

 

It's still weird that the speed test plug in is reporting such a slow upload speed. A red herring in this case.

 

Thanks for helping me brainstorm this everyone! Marking as solved.