Help me understand my network config

[QueOnda]

Hello all,

Ok. I have a wifi with 100MB connected to 2 gigabit switches. Mostly everything in my network is connected to the switches. I have Giigabit on my computer and my readynas and trying to copy files between them. I only get 10-12% transfer (~100MB).

I'm thinking the files might be going through the wireless router or might be having some other problem.

Is that the way it should work? Because the router has the smarts and wants to route traffic?

[paulbeers]

Do your switches connect to each other, or thru the router? If they connect thru the router, then anything on each switch would run gigabit, but the anything that tries to transfer from one switch to the other would only be 100mb. Also, it all depends on the hardware. Not all gigabit NIC's are created equal. Intel are considerably better than Realtec.

Also, based on the reviews I have been reading about the Readynas devices, many do not have that fast of transfer rates (this transfer rate varies based on the model number). CNET reviewed the NV+ and it took 14 minutes to transfer a 5GB file. That speed test equates to approx 50mb/s. No where near gigabit speeds.

Also remember that true gigabit speed, single hard drives become the limiting factor as it equates to 125MB/s which is faster that any current production hard drive on the market.

[stanger89]

Which ReadyNAS? 10-12MB/sec isn't that bad for a ReadyNAS, that's about what I get on my X6. I've seen it up to 20, but 8-10 is more common in my experience.

Now if it's a Pro, then something seems odd. Or if others are seeing much faster than 10-12MB/sec I want to know their secret

[gplasky]

Make sure the computer and NAS are on the same switch. If that's not possible, as paulbeers mentioned ,make sure that one switch plugs into the oher switch and just that switch plugs into the router.

Gerry

[QueOnda]

Thanks guys!!! All great points.

paulbeers, Yes, I have one switch connected to the other switch, then one of the switches is connected to the router. Your explanation makes sense.

stanger89, I do have an X6. I need to do the IO test they recommend to see what I really get.

gplasky, I need to get into my box to see if they are at least on the same switch, if not then I'll make it so.

I seem to be getting ~7% read and 7% write (i'm moving files from one folder to another through my xp computer, both folders are on the NAS) today. But yesterday I was getting 10 to 12% on the write.

I'm going to be getting a 3td HDHR and need to make sure my network can handle it. I have about 3 recording drives, show the drive throughput shouldn't be an issue unless they are all going on the same drive.

Anyone recommend a network analyzer? I know I can check out the throughput by the way infrant (now netgear) recommends (i/O something).

Found something called Wireshark. I guess I want to see what's actually going on when I have everything going.

[stanger89]

I was about to say your network isn't the problem, but mine is horked up royally. I can only get about 100Mbps over my gig-e connection with iperf (no disk issues, just pure lan throughput) between my server and my desktop. This is rather odd because I used to do a lot better than this

O:\Apps\iperf-1.7.0-win32>iperf -c thunderbird -l 64k -t 30 -i 3
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to thunderbird, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[1904] local 192.168.0.5 port 3981 connected with 192.168.0.2 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1904]  0.0- 3.0 sec  26.9 MBytes  75.1 Mbits/sec
[1904]  3.0- 6.0 sec  33.7 MBytes  94.2 Mbits/sec
[1904]  6.0- 9.0 sec  33.5 MBytes  93.7 Mbits/sec
[1904]  9.0-12.0 sec  24.7 MBytes  69.0 Mbits/sec
[1904] 12.0-15.0 sec  33.4 MBytes  93.5 Mbits/sec
[1904] 15.0-18.0 sec  32.0 MBytes  89.5 Mbits/sec
[1904] 18.0-21.0 sec  30.1 MBytes  84.1 Mbits/sec
[1904] 21.0-24.0 sec  28.6 MBytes  79.9 Mbits/sec
[1904] 24.0-27.0 sec  29.2 MBytes  81.6 Mbits/sec
[1904] 27.0-30.0 sec  26.5 MBytes  74.1 Mbits/sec
[1904]  0.0-30.0 sec   299 MBytes  83.4 Mbits/sec

However my server should be capable of more like 600Mbps:

E:\Apps\iperf-1.7.0-win32>iperf -c localhost -l 64k -t 30 -i 3
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to localhost, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[1920] local 127.0.0.1 port 2678 connected with 127.0.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1920]  0.0- 3.0 sec   206 MBytes   577 Mbits/sec
[1920]  3.0- 6.0 sec   223 MBytes   623 Mbits/sec
[1920]  6.0- 9.0 sec   223 MBytes   623 Mbits/sec
[1920]  9.0-12.0 sec   221 MBytes   618 Mbits/sec
[1920] 12.0-15.0 sec   220 MBytes   615 Mbits/sec
[1920] 15.0-18.0 sec   221 MBytes   617 Mbits/sec
[1920] 18.0-21.0 sec   225 MBytes   629 Mbits/sec
[1920] 21.0-24.0 sec   227 MBytes   634 Mbits/sec
[1920] 24.0-27.0 sec   222 MBytes   619 Mbits/sec
[1920] 27.0-30.0 sec   221 MBytes   618 Mbits/sec
[1920]  0.0-30.0 sec  2.16 GBytes   617 Mbits/sec

I ran out of ports recently on my switch so I sorta kludged my new, good switch and my old not so good (though both Gig-E) switch together. Guess I need to take a look.

Just for fun, I like the localhost test on my desktop

O:\Apps\iperf-1.7.0-win32>iperf -c localhost -l 64k -t 30 -i 3
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to localhost, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[1908] local 127.0.0.1 port 3982 connected with 127.0.0.1 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1908]  0.0- 3.0 sec   501 MBytes  1.40 Gbits/sec
[1908]  3.0- 6.0 sec   516 MBytes  1.44 Gbits/sec
[1908]  6.0- 9.0 sec   524 MBytes  1.47 Gbits/sec
[1908]  9.0-12.0 sec   524 MBytes  1.46 Gbits/sec
[1908] 12.0-15.0 sec   516 MBytes  1.44 Gbits/sec
[1908] 15.0-18.0 sec   526 MBytes  1.47 Gbits/sec
[1908] 18.0-21.0 sec   524 MBytes  1.46 Gbits/sec
[1908] 21.0-24.0 sec   537 MBytes  1.50 Gbits/sec
[1908] 24.0-27.0 sec   536 MBytes  1.50 Gbits/sec
[1908] 27.0-30.0 sec   533 MBytes  1.49 Gbits/sec
[1908]  0.0-30.0 sec  5.11 GBytes  1.46 Gbits/sec

5GB in 30 seconds aint to shabby

[QueOnda]

stanger89, I was going to try IOMeter.

But I should use IPerf to compare to your results. Tell me where to download and how to use IPerf and your settings, so I can run a comparison.

[stanger89]

Yeah, they're both valuable. IOMeter is a good real world-ish "what's my read/write speed" test. iperf is good to see if your network is a bottleneck or the device/disk.

[stanger89]

Ah, a working network is a beautiful thing:

O:\Apps\iperf-1.7.0-win32>iperf -c thunderbird -l 64k -t 30 -i 3
------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to thunderbird, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[1904] local 192.168.0.5 port 3257 connected with 192.168.0.2 port 5001
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[1904]  0.0- 3.0 sec   232 MBytes   649 Mbits/sec
[1904]  3.0- 6.0 sec   243 MBytes   680 Mbits/sec
[1904]  6.0- 9.0 sec   233 MBytes   651 Mbits/sec
[1904]  9.0-12.0 sec   235 MBytes   657 Mbits/sec
[1904] 12.0-15.0 sec   223 MBytes   624 Mbits/sec
[1904] 15.0-18.0 sec   240 MBytes   670 Mbits/sec
[1904] 18.0-21.0 sec   240 MBytes   672 Mbits/sec
[1904] 21.0-24.0 sec   240 MBytes   671 Mbits/sec
[1904] 24.0-27.0 sec   242 MBytes   676 Mbits/sec
[1904] 27.0-30.0 sec   239 MBytes   670 Mbits/sec
[1904]  0.0-30.0 sec  2.31 GBytes   662 Mbits/sec

Copies from my ReadyNAS are good again, 28MB/sec reads. Though looks like writes rather suck still.

[tedson]

Everything I know about gig networking that I learned the hard way...

I have a couple XP and a couple vista machines. Here is what I did to get them all transferring at around 70MBs (basically the limit of my hard drives.)

All of these settings are on the advanced tab of the network adapter driver. If you don't have these settings check for a newer driver. On two machines I had to do that because the drivers installed by default didn't make these settings available.

Flow Control - turn it on. On a 100mbs network you want this off because your computers are faster than the network and flow control adds overhead. On a 1gbps network you need this on. It lets the two machines say slow down I can't keep up which keeps the retries down.

Jumbo Frames - if and only if every network card supports jumbo frames and they all support them at the same speed (this includes your switch) turn this on. If not leave it off. You can work around a Vista limitation but turning this on, otherwise see the next setting.

On vista only... First get SP1. Without it network transfers are all messed up. Now change this registry entry HKLM\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows NT\CurrentVersion\Multimedia\SystemProfile\NetworkThrottlingIndex. It will default to 10 which means if any multimedia app is running (say Sage) the network will be limited to 10% its max throughput. You probably want to change that to 70% or so. The setting is low because handling a lot of network traffic can be CPU intensive on really old machines and that messed up audio playback. On a modern computer it usually isn't an issue. Why it doesn't adjust itself to the machine, who knows.

Not all gig switches are alike. More expensive switchs actually seem to be worth it.

Making those settings changes and buying better switches seems to have taken care of all my issues.

[stanger89]

Just another thing, make sure you've got Jumbo frames set correctly. That means if you have them enabled, make sure every device in the chain supports them, and that it's enabled and set right (eg 9000 bytes for size) on all of them.

After I fixed my wonky switch config that was clobbering my network throughput I still had abusrdly low write speeds to my NAS. It was really odd, I could read files at >20MB/sec, bur writes would top out well under 10MB/sec. In IOMeter (config'd per Infrant) I'd see reads >30MB/sec but writes <15MB/sec.

I found a thread on the readynas forums about the same issue that mentioned they fixed it by fixing their Jumbo frame config. Sure enough I went looking and my Desktop had "Jumbo frame size" set to 1500. Changed it to 9000, and now I'm getting >30MB/sec for both reads and writes.

So to recap, these are the things I've done that have got my X6 performing well/correctly:[LIST][*]Factory Default with RAIDiator 4.1.4 (when I swapped 500s for 1.5s, V4 increased the cluster size) - gave me about a 50-100% boost in performance. I actually see 30MB/sec now.[*]Correct switch setup - pulled out the unneeded Linksys "Gigabit" switch, that boosted my raw network throughput from <100Mbps to >700Mbps.[*]Correct Jumbo Frames settings - Didn't change reads from my NAS, but doubled writes.[/QUOTE]

I think I'm finally, again, very happy with my ReadyNAS, I'm copying a blu-ray rip to my X6 right now at a full 26MB/sec

[QueOnda]

My switches are cheap and are not jumbo frames compatible. Currently I'm getting (using IOmeter) 29.12 MBps (Read) and 21.17 MBps (write). What do you think. OK?

[stanger89]

That sounds pretty good.

[tedson]

I'm using linksys switches and my home "NAS" is an MSI Wind desktop with 1 GB of ram and two 1TB SATA drives. It runs windows XP. Everything supports jumbo (I don't remember what the frame size is off the top of my head.) I get between 60 and 70MBs depending on how large the files are. That's almost exactly what I get when I transfer from one hard drive on the machine to another, so I think I'm hitting hard drive limits. Pretty good for how cheap that machine is.

[QueOnda]

I'm just got my 3rd HDHR and going to put it online soon. I already have it connected but haven't added to sagetv yet.