NETGEAR is aware of a growing number of phone and online scams. To learn how to stay safe click here.
Forum Discussion
NV+ slows after 15-20 minutes [SOLVED]
I am experiencing some performance issues with my NV+
It is used for storing drive images created using the Acronis Drive Image 2010 CD. Backups work fine, the issue arises when I come to do a restore. It works well for 20 minutes or so with the hard disk light flashing rapidly, then Acronis starts to show an error saying that the backup source has "poor media quality". After clicking through the error many times, (I assume for retries) sometimes it will run normally again and then have other periods of freezing.
I assumed it was perhaps an out of memory error so upgraded the memory to 512kB, which seems to have had a marginal improvement in performance, but no real change.
What have I done to try and diagnose the problem ?
Changed the network cables
Rebooted the switch (Netgear GS108T)
Changed the ports being used on the switch and connected the Readynas / laptop direct to the router
My NV+ is running Radiator 4.1.7, has a static IP address and has 4 x Seagate ST32000641AS 2TB drives fitted running X-Raid. All disks are in good health.
After struggling to restore a 21GB image yesterday I decided to drag out my old Synology DS101g NAS and try that. I copied the image file across the network using CIFS which took 37 minutes (about 9MB/s) and then did the restore from the Synology. That worked fine, it completed more rapidly than it would have done from the Readynas at full speed and I had just one media quality error. My conclusion from this is that the acronis file is fine, the network cabling is fine, it's the reading from the NV+ that's the problem
Unscientifically, it seems that the NV+ is just bogging down due to memory issues, but I don't know that, which is why am here asking for help.
More details of my setup follows
Static IP
Jumbo frames off (even though it still sends jumbo frames, changing the setting makes no difference to this problem)
1GB full duplex NIC
MTU 1500
CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, Rsync protocols ticked
ReadyDLNA on
NASmonitor installed (shows minimal memory use with about 88% cache)
Full journalling disabled
Fast CIFS writes on
I know my firmware is a few versions out of date, but the more recent updates generally seem to be aimed at newer hardware / apple environments which aren't relevant for me.
I have a secondary issue with both my NV+ and Duo RND2000 in that I can no longer use simply insert a USB stick and copy to the NAS using the backup button. The job always starts and then part way through copying large files it seems to eject the usb and then say it is no longer available ??. I should do another thread for this, but include for information here.
Grateful for any thoughts ?
It is used for storing drive images created using the Acronis Drive Image 2010 CD. Backups work fine, the issue arises when I come to do a restore. It works well for 20 minutes or so with the hard disk light flashing rapidly, then Acronis starts to show an error saying that the backup source has "poor media quality". After clicking through the error many times, (I assume for retries) sometimes it will run normally again and then have other periods of freezing.
I assumed it was perhaps an out of memory error so upgraded the memory to 512kB, which seems to have had a marginal improvement in performance, but no real change.
What have I done to try and diagnose the problem ?
Changed the network cables
Rebooted the switch (Netgear GS108T)
Changed the ports being used on the switch and connected the Readynas / laptop direct to the router
My NV+ is running Radiator 4.1.7, has a static IP address and has 4 x Seagate ST32000641AS 2TB drives fitted running X-Raid. All disks are in good health.
After struggling to restore a 21GB image yesterday I decided to drag out my old Synology DS101g NAS and try that. I copied the image file across the network using CIFS which took 37 minutes (about 9MB/s) and then did the restore from the Synology. That worked fine, it completed more rapidly than it would have done from the Readynas at full speed and I had just one media quality error. My conclusion from this is that the acronis file is fine, the network cabling is fine, it's the reading from the NV+ that's the problem
Unscientifically, it seems that the NV+ is just bogging down due to memory issues, but I don't know that, which is why am here asking for help.
More details of my setup follows
Static IP
Jumbo frames off (even though it still sends jumbo frames, changing the setting makes no difference to this problem)
1GB full duplex NIC
MTU 1500
CIFS, NFS, FTP, HTTP, Rsync protocols ticked
ReadyDLNA on
NASmonitor installed (shows minimal memory use with about 88% cache)
Full journalling disabled
Fast CIFS writes on
I know my firmware is a few versions out of date, but the more recent updates generally seem to be aimed at newer hardware / apple environments which aren't relevant for me.
I have a secondary issue with both my NV+ and Duo RND2000 in that I can no longer use simply insert a USB stick and copy to the NAS using the backup button. The job always starts and then part way through copying large files it seems to eject the usb and then say it is no longer available ??. I should do another thread for this, but include for information here.
Grateful for any thoughts ?
30 Replies
Replies have been turned off for this discussion
- TCP retransmits (recovered or not) are end-to-end stats, not end-to-switch. That makes them hard to diagnose.
Usually if there's a cabling or NIC issue, you'd see some of the other stats grow.
It might be worth trying a direct connect test (where you connect the ethernet cable from the NAS directly into your PC, bypassing your switches, etc). You do need to temporarily an IP address/subnet to the PC that is compatible with the NAS.
We can walk you through the details if you want to try it. - I'll give that a go, I think the challenge will be to see if I can allocate a fixed IP while in the rescue CD environment.
I'll create another image and then try and restore it (both with direct connection) and see how long it takes. I'll be back in a few hours :) - Right, I managed to get the fixed IP without any difficulty. First I created the .tib file, which took between 90 and 105 minutes. It completed without errors. My network stats after the backup were as follows (I forgot to reset the counters before running the backup) :oops:
Auto-negotiation 17
Bad packets 0
Disconnect 13
False carrier 1526
Idle errors 20727
Link failures 0
Receive errors 0
Symbol errors 124
VLAN tags 0
TCP Retransmits 17
Unrecovered TCP Retransmits 7
Then I tried to do a restore, having reset the counters.
It behaved exactly as before, with the job starting well and after 5 minutes running it said 1 hr 39 minutes to complete the job. After 1 hour I went back to check and there was a poor media quality message, with 52 minutes remaining. I clicked through a couple of times for further attempts to get the data, but the error message came back after 6-30 seconds. My best guess is that the job ran fine for 30-40 minutes and the crashed. Network stats were as follows
Auto-negotiation 2
Bad packets 0
Disconnect 2
False carrier 1205
Idle errors 5180
Link failures 0
Receive errors 0
Symbol errors 36
VLAN tags 0
TCP Retransmits 14
Unrecovered TCP Retransmits 5
I have just checked memory usage and 45 minutes after cancelling the restore chached memory is still at 86% meaning 98% of RAM is allocated
Does this help point the finger in any direction ?? - False carrier and idle errors are definitely not good. It makes me wonder about the cabling between the PC and the NAS, as well as the PC nic (since we didn't see these errors when the NAS was connected to the router).
StephenB wrote: False carrier and idle errors are definitely not good. It makes me wonder about the cabling between the PC and the NAS, as well as the PC nic (since we didn't see these errors when the NAS was connected to the router).
I deliberately used the same cable between the pc and the nas as between the switch and the NAS to ensure that would not be a variable. I also used a netgear supplied cable to ensure some sort of quality control. In my testing before writing the post I used various nic cables. changing them didn't seem to make any difference.
11 hours later and the 99% of memory is still allocated. When I used NASTester you could clearly see the memory usage jump up as tasks were carried out, and then drop away to the normal 12-15% when they were complete. that didn't happen with the Acronis backup where the memory remained allocated. As I properly cancelled the job through Acronis (which helpfully said "job successful" after aborting !) it looks like the nv+ hasn't reacted / received the message or it has simply stalled in that job. Frontview etc are slow to respond and fan speed was up at 1923 rpm, even though nothing active has been going on overnight. Hard disk temperatures were 40 C for the middle two and 35 C for the outer ones, so nice & cool.
i'm happy to continue to do some more testing, what's the best course of action from here ?
ps, can you explain what the false carrier / idle errors are..... could it be because i hot swapped the network cable to reset the counters and then hot swapped back ?- False carrier / idle errors are getting pretty deep into the ethernet physical layer signaling (PLS). Kind of an interesting topic, but not one I know much about. I gather that the ethernet chips all monitor signal quality in a specified way, and generate signal_status and data_valid_status messages. The various stats (false carrier, etc) are derived from that by the NIC card itself.
I imagine that inserting/removing the cable could provoke a run of these errors, especially if when the connection is intermittent (and perhaps not fully connecting all 8 pins).
On the main point, I am not certain what to do next. The problem is that we don't actually know what triggers the media quality error from acronis. I'm not sure if the memory allocation information is all that relevant, since it is presumably all cache. Maybe someone else has a thought on what else could be tried. - Hmm, this isn't an easy problem to solve is it.
I have just received a used Readynas Duo, which I intend to use for further testing. This means I should be able to replicate the same test using alternate firmware versions to see if that resolves the problem or not.......... without putting my core data at risk. I have a small 80GB disk which I am just doing a factory reset on, I'll post a progress report later.
In the meantime I am grateful for all the help so far and for any further assistance or suggestions - A little update......
I am facing new challenges. I have factory reset the Duo which was on 4.1.10 and was getting some very strange connectivity results through Frontview, so I decided to upgrade to 4.1.13.
The upgrade went fine, except that I am unable to access any shares from my main laptop, running XP. (but I can from another running Win7 - I thought people had issues with Win 7 sharing !)
|I then discovered that "Share Mode" was dropped and "User Mode" made mandatory from 4.1.10 on, so after unsuccessfully editing the smbpasswd file to remove the "D"s, I decided to downgrade to 4.1.8 which I believe still has share mode.
Despite manually changing all the rights for each protocol, I still don't have Samba/CIFS access :( - I have accessed shared from Windows XP, and I've always used user mode security.
Anyway, did you reset the owner/group and permissions using the advanced tab of the shares? - As usual there's lots of great advice on here.
I have set the advanced permissions of the shares in user mode using the advice in the following thread http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?p=262416#p262416
Having created a backup job to copy a test file from my NV+ to my new Duo (I already have another of those), I also found that files were getting truncated at 1.99GB. Apparently vandermerwe saw this same problem which is due to not specifying a user name in the backup job http://www.readynas.com/forum/viewtopic.php?f=31&t=47751. I have not had to use a user name before and so I understand all the posts in that thread by people saying they have no problem :?
I think I am going to downgrade to 4.1.6 which is what my other Duo is running and I can ensure all the settings are exactly the same, including share mode security. Then I can start getting back to the original problem with the NV+
NETGEAR Academy
Boost your skills with the Netgear Academy - Get trained, certified and stay ahead with the latest Netgear technology!
Join Us!
