Improving Unraid Performance with Many Small Files


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Something else I thought I'd try was to create a share on a Windows 10 VM running on Unraid (which is stored on the SSD).

 

My 100MB small file test copied in 1m50s, peaking around 8MB/s. This is by far the fastest of any test with this set of files I've run so far.

 

On an Unraid share that lives exclusively on cache this took 5m31s. Three times longer.

 

What does this tell you? I guess the problems aren't really on the Mac's side after all. Obviously the hardware on my machine is capable of great speed, even through a virtualization layer into Unraid but there's something about Unraid or Samba severely limiting the performance.

 

I'm not sure what this tells me about what I can actually do to solve this, however.

Edited by Supacon
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Yes, I'm also very unhappy. Last month I started to search for home server solution. Mainly as a backup for photo/video archive, plus some docker and couple VM's. First I wanted to buy QNAP, but changed to fan-less design and better hardware. So I started to search all possible software solutions. UNRAID still remains my favorite. I tried OMV and Proxmox.  OpenNAS don't want because of OpenBSD.

But SMB performance is bad. I expected to run some projects over 10GbE from NVME. But was very disappointed waiting 20+ hours for my 450GB Apple Photos library transferring to UNRAID.
Now I want to try custom linux build. I don't need any kind of parity or RAID. Will just rsync the data from one 10TB drive to another. Probably, I will try LVM cache with NVME to the main HDD, because UNRAID cache is also not what I expected.

 

But I like UNRAID UI and Docker/VM management. Theoretically, I can live with performance issues, but generally speaking, I would like to have more support from the devs. At least some acknowledge.

 

 

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@rhard it seems like you've really evaluated the bulk of other options on the market. I've got some experience with QNAP but I liked the idea of building something on my own for less money with much better specs, Linus Sebastian of LTT speaks highly of Unraid, which is how I discovered this OS. I found an old server locally for cheap that seemed to be a perfect fit. Everything came together so easily in my initial testing. Pop the installer on a USB drive, plug it in, boot, and you're good to go!

 

I really like the Unraid web-based UI (which is high praise from me, as a web developer), the OS is familiar enough to me as I used to administer Linux systems, Unraid has a host of great capabilities, an excellent community of helpful users and developers (@SpaceInvaderOne is awesome), and a broad selection of handy plugins that are easy to install.

 

I'd say that Unraid would be damned near perfect if it wasn't for the alarming fact that (in its current state, in my configuration) it can't seem to reliably and efficiently do the primary thing for which it is designed - share files over SMB!

 

All this might not necessarily be a deal-breaker, though, as it serving as backup for things I rarely access, a self-contained media server that can handle BitTorrent and Plex and later, possibly host a video surveillance VM. So far it seems to work very well at these things. The worst part of actually using it for me was getting a few TB of data moved over to it, which required many restarts, many attempts, and a lot of waiting and restarting. One would think that something like dragging and dropping a few folders from macOS's Finder shouldn't completely kill a high-end computer on a super fast network connection.

 

Hopefully there's just some kind of bug (in my configuration, in macOS, Samba, or in Unraid itself) that will become apparent and be fixed in time, but man, this experience with moving large numbers of files is a major disappointment.

Edited by Supacon
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  • 2 months later...

Hey Supacon,

 

did you find a solution fixing your problems, already?

I'm having somehow similar problems, with shares I can write to very fast, but reading is capped without any chance to get faster, and also, when starting multiple copies in Finder to the UnRAID server, it really craps out sometimes.

Would be good to know, if you found a solution, already.

 

thx,

 

M

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No, I don’t think I ever got this working at a level I am satisfied with. In practice it doesn’t affect me all that much because I only use SMB occasionally to write large files.

 

For keeping some things synced automatically I use Resilio with a Docker in Unraid and it’s very fast compared to SMB.

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  • 1 year later...

Has anyone managed to make any headway here? My experience with larges numbers of files over SMB to or from a Mac is bordering on useless, especially since they dropped AFP (which actually handles large numbers of files quite well). I attempted to copy my large iPhoto library with hundreds of thousands of files and it said it would take several weeks. It's only a couple of TB. And I'm beginning to regret going with Unraid. If I had a 2nd server to copy my 250TB of stuff over to temporarily, I'd be switching. But alas, I don't so I'm trying to figure this out. I tried to get AFP/Netatalk working via Docker, but that's over my head and unfortunately I wasn't able to get any help on these forums. Feeling stuck.

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I refer you to my post here: Search of SMB shares not working (MacOS client)

 

This this solution improved my experience on macOS working with files on Unraid. I too experienced much frustration shifting away from AFP to SMB as the experience seemed much slower. However, with the right configuration changes (both client-side and server-side) I discovered SMB can be as good, if not superior, to AFP. I hope it helps you out.

 

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Sorry to read problem not yet solved. Did you also apply the SMB Signing (MacOS 10.11.4 and Before) tip on the 45Drives page? Well worth doing on the macOS computer to improve SMB performance.

 

These commands typed in using Terminal on macOS.
 

echo "[default]" >> /etc/nsmb.conf

echo "signing_required=no" >> /etc/nsmb.conf

 

…and restart macOS for changes to take effect.

Edited by Maxrad
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1 hour ago, jeremyn said:

I saw that in the page, but since I'm running a newer OS than MacOS 10.11.4 (I'm running 10.14.6), I didn't try it. But as it turns out, I just looked and I already had that in my numb.conf file. 

You can check the file exists and its contents typing the following command into manOS Terminal:

less /etc/nsmb.conf

And it should work fine with any new-ish macOS. I'm running macOS 12.1

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  • 1 month later...
On 12/30/2021 at 1:08 AM, jeremyn said:

Thank you for the link and info, I reconfigured my SMB share with these settings, (customizing to my share paths as needed) and I'm sad to report zero difference. :( 
It takes about 5 - 30 seconds just to start copying each file.

 1340641071_ScreenShot2021-12-29at4_07_24PM.png.f80d4bac3c8e6d8ab783549878122f8a.png

I have the same problem with SMB and MacOS. Did you manage to resolve it?

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  • 4 weeks later...

I

On 2/4/2022 at 6:06 PM, Maxrad said:

I have experience significant performance improvement using macOS Finder connecting to Unraid SMB shares by applying configuration changes detailed here and (most importantly) here. I hope this helps.

 

 

ITS 2022 and this problem is still very much alive. 
My nsmb.conf has the changes you suggested, 
and i'm also adding my complete samba extra on unraid at the bottom of this post.
I don't know that what else to do other than completely moving on to something else. 

HERE IS THE USE CASE: 
Picture this , pro wedding photographer here, so i upload anywhere from 5000-12000 raw files depending on the wedding into subfolder categories by year and date
to the server  (chenbro nr12000 with cache)  here is the problem, MAC OS FINDER basically stops, mac os becomes unresponsive when I access the shares containing the raw files.  Why is that, now I understand its not entirely an unraid problem but I wish they would come up with a fix even if they charged for it.
I did find a workaround by using file browser pro, but now, the server disconnects randomly when upload or download using file browser pro.


 

[global]
min protocol = SMB2
server multi channel support = Yes
server signing = No
read raw = Yes
write raw = Yes
min receivefile size = 16384
strict allocate = Yes
use sendfile = Yes
        aio read size = 0
        aio write size = 16384
        allocation roundup size = 4096
use sendfile = Yes
ea support = Yes
vfs objects = catia fruit streams_xattr
   fruit:resource = file
   fruit:metadata = stream
   fruit:locking = none
   fruit:encoding = native
   fruit:model = MacSamba
   fruit:posix_rename = yes 
   fruit:veto_appledouble = no
   fruit:wipe_intentionally_left_blank_rfork = yes 
   fruit:delete_empty_adfiles = yes 
   fruit:aapl = yes
   fruit:zero_file_id = yes
   fruit:nfs_aces = no
   spotlight backend = tracker

[RLABS_RAW]
   path = /mnt/user/RLABS_RAW
   spotlight = yes
   veto files = /._*/.DS_Store/
   delete veto files = yes


 

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  • 9 months later...
  • 3 weeks later...

Having the same issue in windows - I have 60K~ folders with 2 files in a single folder B on array and writing another file into B folder next to the 60K folders is now so slow, that its transfering at speed of few hundred kilobytes. It's impossible to work with relatively big amounts of folders/files as the performance degrades significally. First 20k files were processed in about 1.5h, the next 40k are processing forth day. I have around 100k to go. I feel like its gonna take whole year. Is there a solution? I thought that I could use Unraid as archival software, but lately it seems like that wasn't a bright idea.

 

Edit: And yes, creating another empty folder next to the folder B and outputting my processed files there is way faster. I would need to merge them later tho, which is still not a solution, but simple workaround.

Edited by Mossshine
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  • 4 weeks later...

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