what is the network throughput on a Thecus 8800PRO

[softdux]

Hi all,

I recently got a Thecus 8800PRO (our supplier doesn't stock the 8800SAS versions) but I'm a bit disappointed in the network throughput I get from it.

Using SMB I get about 40MB/s transfer, using rsync and only about 9Mb/s using NFS on average.

Is this normal from a SATA based NAS, setup in RAID10?


The Thecus 8800PRO is connected via single 1GB NIC to a GB switch, and then I have an HP Prolaint DL360 with 2x 146GB SCSI HDD's setup in RAID1 configuration. From there I mounted an NFS & SMB share on the HP server and did the following tests:

NFS mount options:

192.168.2.200:/raid1/data/raid-share on /thecus/raid-share type nfs (rw,rsize=32768,wsize=32768=timeo=14,intr,addr=192.168.2.200)

NFS transfers:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/thecus/raid-share/largefile.iso bs=1K count=1M


real 0m1.066s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/thecus/raid-share/nfs.iso bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 51.0509 seconds, 21.0 MB/s

real 0m51.122s
user 0m1.560s
sys 0m7.920s

Using SMB was a bit faster, but not too much:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# mount.cifs //192.168.2.200/raid-share /mnt/raid-share/
Password:
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/raid-share/smb.iso bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 28.0072 seconds, 38.3 MB/s

real 0m28.015s
user 0m2.104s
sys 0m11.565s

Creating a file to local disk:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/smb.iso bs=1K count=1M
1048576+0 records in
1048576+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB) copied, 23.9846 seconds, 44.8 MB/s

real 0m24.005s
user 0m2.324s
sys 0m12.529s

Creating a folder in NFS:

[root@HP-DL360 /]# time mkdir /thecus/raid-share/test2

real 0m0.036s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

Creating a folder in SMB:

[root@HP-DL360 /]# time mkdir /mnt/raid-share/test1

real 0m0.019s
user 0m0.000s
sys 0m0.000s

rsync to SMB:

[root@HP-DL360 /]# rsync -avz --progress /*.iso /mnt/raid-share/
building file list ...
4 files to consider
100MB.iso
104857600 100% 32.96MB/s 0:00:03 (xfer#1, to-check=3/4)
10MB.iso
10485760 100% 28.57MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=2/4)
1GB.iso
1048576000 100% 31.12MB/s 0:00:32 (xfer#3, to-check=1/4)
1MB.iso
1048576 100% 996.11kB/s 0:00:01 (xfer#4, to-check=0/4)

FTP upload to the Thecus:

ftp> put ftp.iso
local: ftp.iso remote: ftp.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,2,200,124,115)
150 Accepted data connection
226-File successfully transferred
226 14.233 seconds (measured here), 70.26 Mbytes per second
1048576000 bytes sent in 14 seconds (7.2e+04 Kbytes/s)

FTP download from:

ftp> get ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso
local: ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso remote: ubuntu-9.10-server-amd64.iso
227 Entering Passive Mode (192,168,2,200,120,240)
150-Accepted data connection
150 670220.0 kbytes to download
226-File successfully transferred
226 16.610 seconds (measured here), 39.41 Mbytes per second
686305280 bytes received in 17 seconds (4e+04 Kbytes/s)

Why would FTP download be so much slower? I thought RAID10's read performance would be better than that?

[softdux]

Can anyone help me with this?

[softdux]

Here's an interesting thing:

Mounting the NAS (well, SAN in this case) directly via iSCSI and formatting the partition with ext3 yields the following results:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/iscsi/file1  bs=1M count=2048
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 18.4433 seconds, 116 MB/s
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/dev/zero of=/iscsi/file2  bs=1G count=2
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 18.936 seconds, 113 MB/s

Reading back is a bit slower:

[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/iscsi/file of=/dev/null bs=1M
file1  file2
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/iscsi/file1 of=/dev/null bs=1M
2048+0 records in
2048+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 26.2147 seconds, 81.9 MB/s
[root@HP-DL360 ~]# dd if=/iscsi/file1 of=/dev/null bs=1G
2+0 records in
2+0 records out
2147483648 bytes (2.1 GB) copied, 27.2585 seconds, 78.8 MB/s




So using iSCSI does improve things a bit, but I would still expect better throughput. And I would prefer not to use iSCSI

[meme]

Your NFS speed seems a bit low. We had a problem with write speeds being very slow, however reads were fine:

Write:
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/home/ls3data/users/meme/testfile bs=16k count=16384
268435456 Bytes (268 MB) kopiert, 109,225 s, 2,5 MB/s

Read:
# time dd if=/home/ls3data/users/meme/testfile of=/dev/null bs=16k
268435456 Bytes (268 MB) kopiert, 3,17886 s, 84,4 MB/s


Reason for the slow write speed was the sync option in /etc/exports. After changing it to async, write speed was fine as well:
# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/foo/testfile bs=16k count=16384
268435456 Bytes (268 MB) kopiert, 3,66754 s, 73,2 MB/s

I should probably mention that both systems (n8800pro) and the linux box are connected via the same 1gbit switch.

Now I just need to figure out how to make the async option stick :/ Does anyone happen to successfully use the META module on N8800?


Edit: Got it working. If anyone's interested: www.mmeier.net/262/speeding-up-thecus-n8800pros-nfs-write-performance/