DS411 Real-World Performance? Slow in OSX?

[jake-]

I am not sure what to make of this now because if this happens over NFS as well it's not related to AFP (Netatalk) and indicates more a general problem the DS seems to have when copying small files?

Performance in Windows is fine (even in Windows under Parallels). I guess it's some timing issues in the way OS X handles the protocol.

I also opened a support ticket on that issue last Thursday but haven't heard a beep from Synology on that as of yet ...

Same here. Ticket for the 4.1 beta but no response ...

[ethuesen]

Jumbo frames can give a setback in tranfer speed when transfering a lot of small files..
I am able to download with 75 MB/s from my DS 211j via AFP (no Jumbo frames, MTU 1500)..

[anschmid]

Okay so I have done some real world testing to show the impact and isolate the problem area. That's a bit longer post but it needs that to show where the problem is.

Configuration: DS412+ with 3TB WD drives running RAID 5 with one Volume DSM 4.0-2228. Network connection all hardwired 1GB/s ports via Airport Extreme Router and Netgear 5-port Giga Switch. External HD is a WD Studio via FW800. Two Macs, one a Mac Mini running a RAID 1 and one iMac27 with standard 1TB HD.

Two test subjects of data to transfer:
1) Small Set - Folder with 4.84GB of various drivers for hardware (drives, config files, docs, executables, etc.)
2) Big Set - Mountain Lion Install Image with 4.37GB (a few smaller files but basically one large DMG)

Baseline: Transfer both folders from external FW disk to local internal disk
1) Small Set: 1:39min ~ 50 MB/s
2) Big Set: 1:11min ~ 64 MB/s

This is helpful to see that there is a difference in between transferring lot's of small versus large file even locally. This also shows the pure performance difference without any network impact. Big set is roughly 22% faster.

Network Test: Transfer both folders from Mac Mini to the iMac via a shared folder:
1) Small Set: 2:35min ~ 31.9 MB/s
2) Big Set: 1:39min ~ 45 MB/s

This shows as expected a bit slower performance over network accounting for network protocol etc. which is roughly 32%.

SMB to DS: Transfer of both folders from Mac Mini to the DS412+ (Mounted via smb://dsname/Test)
1) Small Set: 2:16min ~ 36 MB/s
2) Big Set: 1:19min ~ 56 MB/s

Similar to previous test the DS is even faster than the Mac-to-Mac and difference is 36%.

So far everything is within expectations and I'd say operational parameters. Now let's move on to AFP ...

AFP to DS: Transfer both folders from Mac Minot to DS412+ (Mounted via Finder)
1) Small Set: 5:51min ~ 14 MB/s
2) Big Set: 1:43min ~ 43 MB/s

Now this is where the problem is. A slight performance decrease as seen for the big set is acceptable but for the small set the performance just bottoms out totally. In this example there is a difference of 68%.

Also i have not tested this but from what i have seen the drop is proportional to the size and amount of files you transfer. So if you transfer something like you Library directory with lots's of small configuration files it just bottoms out and grinds to a halt. The "small set" had some reasonable size files in it so i could get through the tests.

[mapsen]

Basically this means that those of us whom are using timemachine are [Please control your language], since there is no control over which protocol to use, and as far as I have been told timemachine files are divided into 8 MB = small files!

Can anyone confirm this?

[anschmid]

Yes the sparse bundles are made up of smaller 8MB files called "bands".

And yes time machine sparse bundle files are the special case where i first noticed the issue. copying a few hundred GB of video files to the DS zips through like a knife through butter. Copying a hundreds of GB of time machine sparse bundles is like waiting for eternity.

BTW it doesn't stop there. Once i moved about 3TB worth of time machine sparse bundle backups to the DS i basically pretty much had it stalled with the GUI being unresponsive. reading up on this i suspect this lies int the fact that Netatalk stores HFS+ file info in a database and of course if you fill up the DB with millions of entries it's gonna slow down even more.

I feel very weird because this it doesn't seem to me that this is a special use case I am doing yet it seems this scenarios have never been tested and yet the DS is certified in Mac environment, even as a Time Machine backup device? Speechless.

[mcfrojd]

You dont have a PC to test the same folders from, my expreience is that i get 80-90 mb/s from my pc, up to 40 mb/s (single 39gb file) from my mac mini with osx 10.8 (mountain lion) when copying folders to my ds1010+

And that has come down from up to 65mb/s in osx 10.7 (lion) using AFP in both versions.
To bad for me for using the mac mini as my main download server and mediacenter, and therefor moving the most amount of gb to and from my ds1010+

[jake-]

Okay so I have done some real world testing to show the impact and isolate the problem area. That's a bit longer post but it needs that to show where the problem is.

Also i have not tested this but from what i have seen the drop is proportional to the size and amount of files you transfer. So if you transfer something like you Library directory with lots's of small configuration files it just bottoms out and grinds to a halt. The "small set" had some reasonable size files in it so i could get through the tests.

Thanks for your work! Besides transfer speed there is a problem in the time finder needs to display folder contents. Opening a share with 1000 folders takes very long. Opening one of this folders to show the 2 files within also takes very long (compared to the same on Windows)

This is on smb and afp unfortunately.

[anschmid]

You dont have a PC to test the same folders from, my expreience is that i get 80-90 mb/s from my pc, up to 40 mb/s (single 39gb file) from my mac mini with osx 10.8 (mountain lion) when copying folders to my ds1010+

And that has come down from up to 65mb/s in osx 10.7 (lion) using AFP in both versions.
To bad for me for using the mac mini as my main download server and mediacenter, and therefor moving the most amount of gb to and from my ds1010+

Unfortunately I don't have a PC around, only virtual machines but that would skew the testing as they are running on a host sharing resources etc. it will always be slower than above numbers.

BTW let me just say the test should not be taken performance test of max speeds you can get. i know that the way i tested limits are put on the transfer by the source, i.e. the mac mini, when writing to the DS. i can get >100MB/s on the DS when i write to it from multiple sources. That's not the problem i wanted to investigate, it's the drop in performance for using AFP protocol with small files compared to large ones and using SMB protocol.

[anschmid]

Just another note I was able to get a about 30% performance jump by enabling the cache on my drives!

I noticed earlier that the write cache on my 3TB WD drives was disabled and I was unable to enable them as the option was greyed out. As I thought it might have a performance impact I looked for a way to enable it and found this post:

http://forum.synology.com/enu/viewtopic.php?f=198&t=50283&start=15

As I said enabling it got me to active these results over AFP:
1) Small set: 3:48min ~ 21 MB/s vs 5:51min ~ 14 MB/s without cache
2) Big set: 1:13min ~ 61MB/s vs 1:43min ~ 43 MB/s without cache

Now that's good in general but is not adding to solve the particular slow file over AFP problem as the big file performance improved as well so it's general performance improvement, rather than something specific for AFP.

[coolspot]

Unfortunately I don't have a PC around, only virtual machines but that would skew the testing as they are running on a host sharing resources etc. it will always be slower than above numbers.

I found that even using a virtual machine, Windows SMB is much faster than OSX to the DS. I'm not sure if I'm connecting to the DS using AFP or SMB, is there a way to check?

[anschmid]

Well if you are on Windows it will be SMB as Windows doesn't have AFP.

On OS X if you use the Finder to connect to Synology it will be AFP. If you want to connect via SMB you need to do this:

1) Finder -> Go -> Connect to Server
2) Enter: smb://<DS>/<Share>
3) Hit enter and give username and password when asked (might not if it can connect via guest account)

Then you are connect to DS via SMB protocol

[britcowboy]

I did a backup of my computer using Superduper which backs up the entire drive (220GB ish) to a sparse image. It took around 1h 30m to do it, at an average speed of 25MB/s (Max 50MB/s I believe). To be honest, I don't think that's too bad considering it's actually a load of 8MB files. When I did a time machine backup to my time capsule, it hit highs of 35MB/s max.