Windows Server Network Performance Slow

[fanchazstic]

I have a pc running windows server 2012. I created a network share but when reading from it or writing to it I only get ~55 MB/s. This was a large movie. I previously had FreeNAS on this pc and was getting ~100MB/s. The client computer I am testing with has also stayed the same. I even ran a crystaldiskmark speed test on the disk and I was getting ~120MB/s read and write. Right now I am using a single disk until my new disks come in the mail. I am just trying to get things set up and ready for when my new drives arrive. But this is quite a big issue. I should be able to get full gigabit speed just fine. I have done a lot of reading online and can't find a solution that works for me. Any advice is welcome.

I am also open to better ways to share files throughout the network

[Electronics Wizardy]

what files are you sending. Small files and folders are much slower.

[fanchazstic]

6 minutes ago, Electronics Wizardy said:

what files are you sending. Small files and folders are much slower.

I was testing with a large movie. 13GB

Even connecting the server directly to the client with a patch cable (no network connected to either computer), the speeds were ~20MB/s

[leadeater]

Are you also running the Active Directory role on the server OS? If you are the enforced signed and encryption policies applied by default require at lot of CPU resource and will reduce the throughput. Number of people have lately been posting about similar problems and almost all of them were also running an DC on the OS.

[fanchazstic]

1 minute ago, leadeater said:

Are you also running the Active Directory role on the server OS? If you are the enforced signed and encryption policies applied by default require at lot of CPU resource and will reduce the throughput. Number of people have lately been posting about similar problems and almost all of them were also running an DC on the OS.

I am not running active directory. Right now it is acting only as a file server

[leadeater]

Create a RAM disk on the server and also on the client and do a file copy test to and from the server, just to rule out any disk limitations. I know the the benchmark showed high enough performance but it is a worth while test.

 

Also use something like iperf to test the actual network throughput.

 

Doing both of these will hopefully show something useful to further diagnose the issue.

[fanchazstic]

54 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Create a RAM disk on the server and also on the client and do a file copy test to and from the server, just to rule out any disk limitations. I know the the benchmark showed high enough performance but it is a worth while test.

 

Also use something like iperf to test the actual network throughput.

 

Doing both of these will hopefully show something useful to further diagnose the issue.

Ok, I will try both of those right now

[fanchazstic]

54 minutes ago, leadeater said:

Create a RAM disk on the server and also on the client and do a file copy test to and from the server, just to rule out any disk limitations. I know the the benchmark showed high enough performance but it is a worth while test.

 

Also use something like iperf to test the actual network throughput.

 

Doing both of these will hopefully show something useful to further diagnose the issue.

Hmmm, well with the ram disk I transferred a 1GB file and it got ~82MB/s. So I guess the bottleneck is the drive. It just seems weird because locally it gets perfectly fine test results. Not that 82MB/s is perfect, but it shows that the network is not the current bottleneck? Maybe?

I threw a different drive into the system and got the exact same results as the first drive. ~55MB/s. I tried to use iperf but I couldn't figure it out

[leadeater]

16 minutes ago, fanchazstic said:

Hmmm, well with the ram disk I transferred a 1GB file and it got ~82MB/s. So I guess the bottleneck is the drive. It just seems weird because locally it gets perfectly fine test results. Not that 82MB/s is perfect, but it shows that the network is not the current bottleneck? Maybe?

I threw a different drive into the system and got the exact same results as the first drive. ~55MB/s. I tried to use iperf but I couldn't figure it out

The 82MB/s you mentioned is actually pretty bad for a RAM disk network transfer, you should be getting ~110MB/s. Have a look at this http://45drives.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/how-to-tune-nas-for-direct-from-server.html.

 

Scroll to the bottom "Example 3" and check those along with making sure any offload settings are enabled, do not enable jumbo frames.

[fanchazstic]

4 minutes ago, leadeater said:

The 82MB/s you mentioned is actually pretty bad for a RAM disk network transfer, you should be getting ~110MB/s. Have a look at this http://45drives.blogspot.co.nz/2016/05/how-to-tune-nas-for-direct-from-server.html.

 

Scroll to the bottom "Example 3" and check those along with making sure any offload settings are enabled, do not enable jumbo frames.

I already tried increasing the buffers. They are currently set at their max on both ends

[Jarsky]

16 hours ago, fanchazstic said:

 I tried to use iperf but I couldn't figure it out

 

For basic usage, you download it to both computers and unzip it.

Open Command prompt and navigate to the iperf folder.

start 1 with the command 'iperf -s' to be server and the other with the command 'iperf -c <hostname of iperfserver>

 

[fanchazstic]

On 5/16/2016 at 2:44 PM, Jarsky said:

 

For basic usage, you download it to both computers and unzip it.

Open Command prompt and navigate to the iperf folder.

start 1 with the command 'iperf -s' to be server and the other with the command 'iperf -c <hostname of iperfserver>

 

sorry it took so long. I had a very busy couple of days. but here it is 

[Blake]

8 hours ago, fanchazstic said:

sorry it took so long. I had a very busy couple of days. but here it is 

You network connection looks fine for a network point of view.

 

I'd say it is going to be something else. Normally, without any information i'd point you in the direction of the storage array. My guess is your using a software raid of some type? And if you using a parity raid also then that's your issue.

 

 

[.:MARK:.]

10 hours ago, Blake said:

You network connection looks fine for a network point of view.

 

I'd say it is going to be something else. Normally, without any information i'd point you in the direction of the storage array. My guess is your using a software raid of some type? And if you using a parity raid also then that's your issue.

 

 

But RAMdisk had speeds of less than 100MB/s so I'm not too sure array is at fault.

[Mikensan]

You created a ramdisk on both ends correct? Does either box use a really long cable? Have you tried swapping the cable out? 

[fanchazstic]

1 hour ago, Mikensan said:

You created a ramdisk on both ends correct? Does either box use a really long cable? Have you tried swapping the cable out? 

I created a ramdisk on both ends. On the server I created a folder in the ram disk made it a share. I put a 1GB file in the ram disk on the client. I copied the file from the client ram disk to the shared folder on the server ram disk.

3 hours ago, .:MARK:. said:

But RAMdisk had speeds of less than 100MB/s so I'm not too sure array is at fault.

I am currently using a single drive for this until my new drives get here. I have an OS drive and a data drive. Both 500GB WD Caviar Blue drives. Nothing fancy, just what I had laying around to do some tests until my 2tb drives arrive. 

14 hours ago, Blake said:

You network connection looks fine for a network point of view.

 

I'd say it is going to be something else. Normally, without any information i'd point you in the direction of the storage array. My guess is your using a software raid of some type? And if you using a parity raid also then that's your issue.

 

 

 

Like I said, single disk. Right now the server is sitting right next to the client. I have a gigabit switch they are both connected to with ~5ft cables. They are cat6 cables, so they are up to spec. When I was testing out freenas I had an issue with an older cable limiting the link speed to 100mbps, but the issue was fixed by switching out the cable to a new one. Also both the client and the server are showing a gigabit connection.

 

I'll try out the ramdisk again and see what happens. Is this issue just overhead in the protocol? It seems a little excessive, but maybe I should just stick with freenas. Freenas works fine, I just wanted to be able to run things like plex on the same machine and that is surprisingly difficult to do in freenas. I was hoping to run a dynamic dns client, plex server, ftp server, and arq 5 backup software to backup the whole nas to amazon cloud drive (offsite backup). I have tried using freenas jails but I only got plex to work once. It worked for a couple minutes and then stopped working. No matter how many times I removed the plugin, deleted everything, and tried again it would not work. So I gave up on freenas and figured server 2012 would be much easier to work with. But maybe I should install esxi and run both freenas and a windows server vm. I could just use freenas for the file server and use windows for all the apps and other servers I need. I know you aren't supposed to run freenas in a vm, but it is possible. I'm just throwing out ideas at this point and any advice would be appreciated. 

[Mikensan]

I used this guide to setup a plex jail. Using the plugin just doesn't work for me either. Instead using the package from FreeBSD worked great. If you have a plex pass, a little further down in the comments it lists the plexpass package name.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/tutorial-how-to-install-plex-in-a-freenas-9-3-jail-updated.19412/

 

Unless you're doing something else in the background like watching youtube or downloading a file while you also try to transfer the movie between ramdisks, there's no reason you shouldn't be seeing over 100mbps.

[fanchazstic]

47 minutes ago, Mikensan said:

I used this guide to setup a plex jail. Using the plugin just doesn't work for me either. Instead using the package from FreeBSD worked great. If you have a plex pass, a little further down in the comments it lists the plexpass package name.

https://forums.freenas.org/index.php?threads/tutorial-how-to-install-plex-in-a-freenas-9-3-jail-updated.19412/

 

Unless you're doing something else in the background like watching youtube or downloading a file while you also try to transfer the movie between ramdisks, there's no reason you shouldn't be seeing over 100mbps.

I was using teracopy to copy the files and decided to try using the default windows one instead. To the ram disk, it stayed at about 95MB/s but would drop to 91. When I went back to copying the movie to the disk share, it transferred at 50MB/s. So I'm just going to assume my disk is the issue. 95MB/s isn't perfect but I'm totally fine with it if I can get that on consistent basis.

Also I was not doing anything in the background on either machine

[Jarsky]

I would say its your disk thats limiting performance.

 

The iPerf results look perfectly fine which proves to us that the network and the OS/Memory/etc...is not at fault.

So it can only be something related to your SATA/Disks.

 

Wether that be a dodgy SATA connection. SATA configuration e.g set to SATA1 speeds. Something to with an array/software raid configuration, or something to do with the hardware disk controller.

[Mikensan]

95 is reasonable, there's also your switch to take in to account (unless you were geting more than 95 with freenas on the same switch). Some switches can only handle 1gbps total throughput.

 

You could also use iperf to test between the two ramdisks as well, which takes smb portocol as a possible issue.

 

Just thought of another thing, I wonder if FreeNAS enables device polling while windows has it disabled - or vice versa. If you go into the device configuration for the NIC, one of the many settings may be device polling, toggle it on/off see if there's any improvement.

 

But overall yes, it does sound like your disk is the cause for 50mbps. Weird that the benchmarks are 120mbps but then again they are synthetic tests.

[fanchazstic]

10 hours ago, Mikensan said:

95 is reasonable, there's also your switch to take in to account (unless you were geting more than 95 with freenas on the same switch). Some switches can only handle 1gbps total throughput.

 

You could also use iperf to test between the two ramdisks as well, which takes smb portocol as a possible issue.

 

Just thought of another thing, I wonder if FreeNAS enables device polling while windows has it disabled - or vice versa. If you go into the device configuration for the NIC, one of the many settings may be device polling, toggle it on/off see if there's any improvement.

 

But overall yes, it does sound like your disk is the cause for 50mbps. Weird that the benchmarks are 120mbps but then again they are synthetic tests.

I went into the device config for both nics and neither had that option