help regarding network speed ? pics inside

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I just got around completing my network, coming from an alix system.

I installed ipfire(ipcop fork) and have a belkin gigabit switch which is connected to my freenas box.

I've connected my laptop via lan and I am accessing my share to transfer my "The wire box set" i am confused by the speeds are they normal for my specs ?

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I understand there are some factors to consider such as network card brand, cpu , ram etc which could be possible bottlenecks.

My specs are as follows: the nic is a gigabit realtek (i know real bad compared to intel) and the cpu is a atom n230 with 1gb ram.
My hd is a samsung f4 2tb

I have see proprietary NAS with poorer specs achieve 50MB/seconds

edit: one other question, as far as i know there are no atoms boards with onboard raid. How does software raid compare in regards to performance on freenas.

objective is to get over 40MB/s transfer speeds
 
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Have a go at copying one large item as opposed to many smaller ones.

Can't imagine disk speeds causing a bottleneck like that and you're certainly above 100mb.
 
i guess achieving 100MB/s speeds is probably out the of the question ?

probably have to go with sata-3 6Gs/s
 
I think it could be down to the samsung HD204UI drives i have which are 54000rpm which apparently run at speeds of 72000rpm

i find it hard to believe samsung
 
Both pc's have media player closed? when its open it limits network bandwidth on any. Also try using pikybasket for large number of file transfers gives you a more accurate rate.
 
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Both pc's have media player closed? when its open it limits network bandwidth. Also try using pikybasket for large number of file transfers gives you a more accurate rate.

freenas doesnt have media player , what you on about ?

this transfer is between my laptop and nas
 
Indeed having media player open used to cause the issue but meh will just leave him to it. I will assume you never tried pikybasket either
 
Media player opened on your laptop perhaps? :rolleyes:

it wouldnt matter anyway because my CPU on my computer is a core i7.

this is regarding nic configuration and possible driver issue within FreeBSD.

realtek nic are known for poor speeds. I just checking for some clarification or some possible tweaks.

asking questions such as whether i got media player open is quiet irrelevant in this case.
 
Why I bothered trying to help I don't know. Your copying files using windows 7 It was a known issue either copying to or from something on windows 7 with media player open or infact even the service that dealt with the networking side of media player caused slow speeds. Was throwing it out there just in-case.

And as for pikybasket fair enough it again was just a suggestion as its better at handling multiple file transfers and would show you at what point in transferring the issue is coming from eg. maybe its taking a long time to start the next file thus it could be an issue with the nas software... You dont want to take advice fair enough just say thanks that didnt work and move on just dont be a tard about it. And your super i7 that wouldn't matter regarding the network transfer issue is nothing to do with the media player issue I was talking about as it was a service related problem not a cpu speed issue.

Lets hope someone comes up with something that solves it for you then that meets your approval
 
First thing I'd say is that SAMBA/CIFS on FreeNAS is usually pretty rubbish compared to native windows file sharing, though I'd still expect you to be getting 40-50MB/s. You probably need to up the SAMBA/CIFS settings.
This page should help : http://learnedbyerror.blogspot.com/2009/09/lets-tune-er-up.html

Network wise again, even on crappy Realtek nics 40-50MB/s should be possible (check windows nic drivers up to date). With my Athlon X2 Windows file server I got 100MB/s broadcom to realtek nics, and get 110MB/s sustained transfers Intel to Intel now. That's without any Jumbo Frames - for me they made very little difference and are more trouble that they're worth unless you have decent network equipment to run jumbo frames on a separate vlan (or enough surplus nics, switches and cables to create a separate physical LAN)

Can you see what results you get benchmarking the network connection with iperf using a 56KB window size (run iperf -s on one machine, and iperf -c <iperf server IP> -w 56KB -t 20)?
Make sure that TCP offloading options are turned on in your NIC configurations. plenty of guides if you google.

RAID wise, levels 0 and 1 should have minimal impact, even on an atom machine. If you're asking it to do software parity calculations (RAID5 / RAIDZ etc) then write speeds would certainly suffer, especially if the atom is only a single core and theres SAMBA and network activity is going on. Have you tried monitoring CPU use whilst you copy a file to and from the NAS?
 
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First thing I'd say is that SAMBA/CIFS on FreeNAS is usually pretty rubbish compared to native windows file sharing, though I'd still expect you to be getting 40-50MB/s. You probably need to up the SAMBA/CIFS settings.
This page should help : http://learnedbyerror.blogspot.com/2009/09/lets-tune-er-up.html

Network wise again, even on crappy Realtek nics 40-50MB/s should be possible (check windows nic drivers up to date). With my Athlon X2 Windows file server I got 100MB/s broadcom to realtek nics, and get 110MB/s sustained transfers Intel to Intel now. That's without any Jumbo Frames - for me they made very little difference and are more trouble that they're worth unless you have decent network equipment to run jumbo frames on a separate vlan (or enough surplus nics, switches and cables to create a separate physical LAN)

Can you see what results you get benchmarking the network connection with iperf using a 56KB window size (run iperf -s on one machine, and iperf -c <iperf server IP> -w 56KB -t 20)?
Make sure that TCP offloading options are turned on in your NIC configurations. plenty of guides if you google.

RAID wise, levels 0 and 1 should have minimal impact, even on an atom machine. If you're asking it to do software parity calculations (RAID5 / RAIDZ etc) then write speeds would certainly suffer, especially if the atom is only a single core and theres SAMBA and network activity is going on. Have you tried monitoring CPU use whilst you copy a file to and from the NAS?

thank you appreciate your help and info.
just the answer i was looking for
 
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