Ready Duo super slow!

[dannysmith43]

Hi Guys,

Hope you can help with this one!

I've recently purchased a HP Microserver and have been attempting to backup the contents on my DUO box to it, but my god is this a slow process!

At present I am getting 6.8MB/s copying a large folder (containing 450GB of AVI files). I have followed the optimization techniques for performance with disabling journaling and enabling jumbo frames (on the Duo and Server). As for troubleshooting I have tried the following;

Changing the Ethernet cable
Connecting the DUO directly to the server (no switch)
Using a different switch (currently a Billion 7800N)
Disabled all non-essential discover / streaming services
Latest firmware (4.1.
Microserver doesn't have AV or Firewall

The Duo has 2x 1TB WD Greens (WD10EARS) install and I never remember it being this slow.

I checked for HD / ATA errors but there aren't any - I did check for "Network Errors" errors and found that there are;

Network Errors [Ethernet 1]

Auto-negotiation 2
Bad packets 0
Disconnect 0
False carrier 0
Idle errors 510
Link failures 0
Receive errors 19368
Symbol errors 0
VLAN tags 0
TCP Retransmits 53
Unrecovered TCP Retransmits 6

The receive errors seems a little bit high?!

Not sure what to look at next? Any help would be great.

Thanks,

Danny

[StephenB]

Receive errors could be related to cabling. I suspect Auto-negotiation failure can also create receive errors (particularly if the duo is running half duplex, and the sender is full duplex). Are you using cat-5e or better?

How are you doing the backup? NFS, SMB, Rsync? Is it a one-time thing, or something you want to regularly schedule?

[dannysmith43]

Hi,

Thanks for the reply.

I have tried 2 different cables, Cat5e and Cat6.
I'm literally browsing to the NAS via UNC and dragging and dropping the folder from 1 location to another - perhaps there is a better way??

[dannysmith43]

OK, I started a new transfer (photos) around 5mb a file.

I removed jumbo frames and updated the driver on the Microserver and now I'm getting around 11.3MB/s instead of 6.88MB/s I was getting earlier with the video files (700MB - 1400MB).

Still seems low for a read speed?

[StephenB]

11 MB/s sounds like 100 mbit ethernet, not gigabit. So that might be worth looking at. Though turning jumbo offs off normally wouldn't matter unless you were running gigabit. Are they also turned off on the Duo?

You could also check the path MTU, there is a procedure here: http://www.dslreports.com/faq/5793 It is possible that you need to be a little smaller than the normal 1500.

For bulk windows transfers to/from Windows systems I generally use robocopy (a command line tool from Microsoft, but there are gui's available). The main benefits are that it will automatically retry if there is a connection issue, and that it will do incremental copies.

How much more data do you have to move? You might be better off let it finish, than spending hours on troubleshooting the speed.

[dannysmith43]

The Microserver reports a 1Gb/s connection, as does the NAS box. Did the MTU test and it was pinging @ 1472, so +28 is 1500 which is what the MTU on the the NAS box is.

Can anyone with a DUO v1 confirm their read speeds? 11.2MB seems low but I know this model has a very shitty CPU? I had just under a TB to move over, now there is a 200GB or so left. I will give robocopy and go, I've used it at work but it just takes so long at these speeds....I'd expect at least....25MB/s?! is that too much to ask for lol?

[dannysmith43]

I just installed the beta firmware (4.1.9) copying off some video and now getting 24.8MB/s!!!! This is acceptable but can I get better?

[StephenB]

I just installed the beta firmware (4.1.9) copying off some video and now getting 24.8MB/s!!!! This is acceptable but can I get better?

I think you are now at the ceiling of the Duo V1 performance. You can look here: http://www.readynas.com/?p=177#Performance

[alistairburch]

You should be happy with 11MB/s. I am struggling to get over 700kB/s. I have done the IO test and that reports inexcess of 50 MB/s (read 29 write 28MB/s). So why has it taken 4 days to copy 300GB from a WD "My Passport" plugged into the Duo direct???

[mdgm]

You are talking about something very different Alistair. Copying to/from USB drives is a very different thing to transferring data across a network.

USB is a CPU hog. Moreover depending on the filesystem used on the USB disk, number and size of files etc. performance can vary a fair bit. EXT2/3 are native Linux filesystems and performance is very good. FAT32 (note this filesystem has a 4GB limit per file) performance is not as good, but O.K. and NTFS performance is terribly slow with the Duo (v1). The newer models are much more powerful and have much better USB performance. You may well find it faster to hook the USB drive up to your PC and transfer data across your network.