Link Aggregation – Success (802.3ad, Teaming, Trunking)

[Roughrider]

Do you find your Netgear web interface to be slow?

I used to, in fact it would eventually hang loading the graphic for the login screen, a reboot always fixed this. I haven't had this problem for a while though, now I find it OK but I agree it is not super-responsive, certainly a few seconds not instant, but none of my netgear devices web interfaces are instant. Mine doesn't seem broken in any case.

[begunfx]

oquraishi,
thanks for taking the time to share your experience in optimizing your network. I have some questions for you as I'm trying to improve my network performance. Here's my setup (in brief).

Custom Windows 7 64bit workstation
gigabyte motherboard: ga-x58-ud5
6 core intel cpu
24gb of ram
2x1tb WD Velociraptor 10krpm drives (Raid 1) - Boot Drive
4x2tb Hitachi 7200rpm (Raid 5) - Data Drive
Intel Pro/1000 Dual NIC

Late 2008 MacBook Pro w/Crucial m4 SSD 512gb / 8gb ram

Netgear GS724t 24 port managed switch

DS412+
DS1812+

Cat 6 cable on everything.

I have the Windows Machine, Netgear Switch and both Synology boxes configured with Teaming (no jumbo frames).

I also setup the Intel NIC card on the windows machine with all the recommended settings in the link you provided (except jumbo frames).

Currently I'm getting about 40mb transfer rate when copying a 1-gb file from my DS412+ to my Windows machine. What I'm wondering is what you said here:

Between the Solid State Drive, RAID5, and RAM Drive I first optimized internal transfer speeds and identified bottlenecks within the system.

What settings did you optimize in your windows machine to improve performance? And, how did you identify your bottlenecks? Also my tests were copying files from my DS to my boot drive (the 10k velociraptor drives).

So I'm not sure why my transfer speeds are hovering around 40. I'd love to see them at least at 100mb.

Any suggestions/advice would be most appreciated.

UPDATE: I noticed that the 40mb transfer rate I was getting was for reading a 1gb file from my DS to my boot drive (2x1tb 10k velociraptor/raid 1). When I copied a 71gb file from my Data Drive (4x2tb hitachi 7.2k/raid 5) to the DS, I was getting around 70-75mb transfer speeds. Although the write speed is measurably better, still seems a bit slow. I'm gonna do some tests to see if I can isolate what is creating the slowdown or contributing most.

[rixo]

Oquraishi,

I think your post should be nominated to the post of the year
I have a DS1010+ and when I got it back in 2010 I was toying with the trunking idea, but decided not to go with it as my primary usecase is SINGLE client/workstation access and it seems that you too confirmed that trunking won't improve the performance.

When setting my system I did quite an extensive set of tests with different types of RAIDs eventually setting on RAID5 as it seemed to offer good trade-off performance vs redundancy.


What caught my eye in your post was your remark:

Originally my RAID5 was abysmally slow (under 40MB/sec on average for large files). I had to setup the RAID5 trying out different Allocation Size and Strip Sizes until I found the magic combo. I am purposely NOT posting these as you’ll need to experiment to find the numbers that work for you. In order to test quickly I created smaller RAID5 volumes (40GB) so that they could initialize fast (5-10min instead of 40hrs if I setup a volume using the entire array). Without changing any hardware at all I was able to get amazing performance improvements (see Baseline performance results below).

While getting transfer speeds around 90-95MB/s from/to NAS, the disks in the NAS (Caviar black 2TB FASS) are capable of more - internally in the PC I can achieve 160MB/s.
---------
EDIT:
I re-read your post and realized you talked about optimizing an internal RAID5 - not NAS RAID5. From other posts I gathered that there is no way to change the RAID5 parameters on Synology. So now I guess my question below does not make sense in the context of the NAS. I guess I'm just reaching the max throughput what my 1010+ is capable of. Maybe switching to a better NIC would push a few MB more (now I'm on an internal motherboard NIC )?
---------

It's been a while, but while setting my RAID5 I don't recall changing anything I assume I left it on default settings - whatever they were. As I don't have an easy way to experiment now, since most of the NAS capacity is already used. I was wondering if you, or somebody knowledgeable, could comment on what is there to be gained with optimizing the allocation size and the strip size in my context:

Most of my files stored on the NAS are around 25MB in size (RAW photo files). I have around 200k of those files and growing. I'm primarily interested to improve the read performance as I write once and read often.

Thanks a lot for any performance tips,
Richard

for what is worth, I attach my earlier RAID comparisons


complete table as jpg:
http://photocay.com/imagepool/2012/synology.jpg

[drSHLEFF]

Thanks for the great write up! I have a question regarding to the Intel dual port PCIe card. I also have the same card that you have, but when I put my pc to sleep, I'm unable to wake it because one of the ports go to standby mode. Luckily, I have 2 more ethernet cards on this PC and I use one of them to wake the PC (for now). I lose my connection when one of the port goes to standby mode. So my question is how do I prevent both ports from going to standby mode?

My hardware setup is similar as yours minus the apple airport extreme, and instead of the Buffalo router, I have a netgear 3700 router. However, my usage and intend for the setup is a bit different from yours thus I don't have the 2 layers of IP address and so I need to have my teaming port to be active and not rely on another ethernet port to wake the PC when need to.

Thanks
TTK

I have the same issue. But i can't find some information about repair this problem. Nobody knows... So, after waking up my comp every time i turned off and back turned on lag network adapter. The end.

[BDMSTUDIOS]

Hi oquraishi,

Came across this fantastic post even just after a few day's owning a DS1812+ back in Feb 2013. After reading your post, I said to myself, this is exactly want I need and want to do with my new Syno NAS. After exploring every detail of your post, today my quest finally came to an end! I got my new config up-and-running in full LA!

As a token of my appreciation for your work, I would like to share with you my post (with a direct link-reference to your post of-course) on the Dutch Synology forum!

http://www.synology-forum.nl/file-ftp-n ... zeg-doen!/

Thanks again for this post, great read and your all your effort you put in it to share this with us!

Kind regards and a lot of cheers to you,
Berend