NAS Running Wicked Slow

nurikabe · 04-07-2009, 08:49 AM

I have a Buffalo TerraStation formatted for XFS connected over a CIFS mount. Writing to this is (at least) 2x slower than writing to the main drive. I expected some slowdown, but this seems a bit much. Does it sound like my NAS is misconfigured?

MS3FGX · 04-07-2009, 11:40 AM

You mean writing to the NAS is slower than the local drive? That is expected, but it is hard to say if it is within normal parameters or not without some hard numbers.

What is the MBps read/write time are you getting to the mounted drive?

You can get a rough idea by mounting the CIFS share, and running the following command in it:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=1M count=100

This will create a 100 MB file from your local drive to the CIFS share, and give you a report about time taken and write speed.

nurikabe · 04-09-2009, 09:55 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by MS3FGX

You mean writing to the NAS is slower than the local drive? That is expected, but it is hard to say if it is within normal parameters or not without some hard numbers.

What is the MBps read/write time are you getting to the mounted drive?

You can get a rough idea by mounting the CIFS share, and running the following command in it:

Code:

dd if=/dev/zero of=./test bs=1M count=100

This will create a 100 MB file from your local drive to the CIFS share, and give you a report about time taken and write speed.

On the main HDD:

Code:

104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 0.41814 seconds, 251 MB/s

On the NAS:

Code:

104857600 bytes (105 MB) copied, 107.53 seconds, 975 kB/s

Not just wicked slow, but wicked freaking slow.

MS3FGX · 04-09-2009, 02:43 PM

Wow...

That is a lot slower than I expected. I am not even sure what could be causing speeds that poor in software.

Is any communication with the NAS at a reasonable speed? In other words, if you use a different protocol like FTP, do you get the same miserable speed? It almost seems like you are maybe getting dropped packets or something to have that type of transfer rate.

It might be worth doing a ping flood (ping -f IP Address), which will hammer the NAS with echo requests. If you are not getting 100% of them back, then you likely have some kind of hardware issue.