Painfully slow access times on Unraid

[julianhj]

I've been running Unraid for about five years on an HP Microserver. It's a Gen 7 with the AMD Turion II Neo N54L Dual Core 2200Mhz and 4GB RAM. I'm using 4x 3TB WD Reds, a 6TB WD Red as a parity drive and a 120GB Samsung 840 Evo as a cache drive.

It's primarily a file server and a Plex server. Recently I've noticed that access times via Finder have been painfully slow. I previously had it connected to my router via powerline adapters, but I was only getting around 40Mbps over that connection so moved it adjacent to the router in order to connect directly via ethernet.

It's generally accessed wirelessly by mine and my wife's Macbooks. We get a very decent connection to the router so I don't think that's the issue (no problem downloading huge files such as ISOs from the internet over our fibre connection).

My wife has just complained again about her frustration with interacting with her shares. I opened the dashboard and saw that the CPU was running at 50-75%, even whilst she was just waiting for one of the directories to open - this can sometimes take a minute or so.

I'm trying to work out what the bottleneck is - an Unraid issue, Microserver hardware limitations, network issue (router/LAN/Wi-Fi) or something to do with the Macbooks (can't think what) - does anyone have any practical suggestions?

 

[Avalon]

Are you running a current stable build? Are the drives spun down/spinning up on access? What’s the Microserver actually doing IO wise?Do you have the same issue connecting using a cable and on other clients? What FS are the drives using? Is UnRAID doing a parity check? I could go on, but we really need more details to get any further.

 

[Psycho Sonny]

Sound like weak hardware.

My unraid server is using a ryzen 3600 6 cores with 12 threads.

As well as a 1650 super for transcoding as it has nvenc capability.

Without the 1650 super it would use 90-100% of cpu to transcode.

I also have 16gb of ram.

Looking at it now its using 4gb of ram and 15-20% of cpu and I'm not even streaming anything from it. So it's using 3 cores just downloading files and updating stuff, etc.

Most files are much larger and use higher bit rates these days. You probably don't need as much cpu power as I have or as much ram.

But 4 cores, 8gb of ram and a 1650 super is recommended for media server usage in this day and age.

 

[ecksmen]

I've been running Unraid for about five years on an HP Microserver. It's a Gen 7 with the AMD Turion II Neo N54L Dual Core 2200Mhz and 4GB RAM. I'm using 4x 3TB WD Reds, a 6TB WD Red as a parity drive and a 120GB Samsung 840 Evo as a cache drive.

It's primarily a file server and a Plex server. Recently I've noticed that access times via Finder have been painfully slow. I previously had it connected to my router via powerline adapters, but I was only getting around 40Mbps over that connection so moved it adjacent to the router in order to connect directly via ethernet.

It's generally accessed wirelessly by mine and my wife's Macbooks. We get a very decent connection to the router so I don't think that's the issue (no problem downloading huge files such as ISOs from the internet over our fibre connection).

My wife has just complained again about her frustration with interacting with her shares. I opened the dashboard and saw that the CPU was running at 50-75%, even whilst she was just waiting for one of the directories to open - this can sometimes take a minute or so.

I'm trying to work out what the bottleneck is - an Unraid issue, Microserver hardware limitations, network issue (router/LAN/Wi-Fi) or something to do with the Macbooks (can't think what) - does anyone have any practical suggestions?

The issue will be on the Macbook; SMB performance is terrible; if security is less of a concern do an NFS export and see if it helps. I've given up trying to get good performance from my Macbook to my NAS (note, not unraid). On all systems theres a small delay for the disk spin up, but its then fine. On the MAC I can be waiting ages (minutes) for a simple directory load.

 

[visibleman]

First, try disabling drive spin-down within Unraid and see if that improves access times - you can always 'tune' spin-down time afterwards.

Second, look at enabling vfs_fruit under Unraid (i believe Unraid added it as a GUI option) - this can be hit/miss.

Third*, on MacOS i would also (force) disable Samba packet signing on MacOS (https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT205926), which might not necessarily help with access times but should give you an improvement with transfer speeds.

And lastly*, try disabling directory caching and/or DS_Store reading/writing to network shares within MacOS (https://support.apple.com/en-gb/HT208209) and see if a mixture of those two help.

But as @ecksmen mentions, Samba under MacOS is poorly implemented and you might be better off with AFP or using NFS if you don't need private shares (you can restrict to client addresses using Unraid's rules).

* Make a copy of current settings, in case you need to revert, test one and a time and make a note of the final changes as you may need to reapply after updates. Also most of these options require logout/login and/or reboots for them to take effect.

Edit - Just to add, i always remember getting better performance out of an Intel PCIE NIC (can't remember the model number) on my N40L than with the onboard; not sure why as i always thought the onboard HP NIC didn't off-load to the CPU but could be wrong.