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Performance halved at a stroke (ReadyNAS Duo, 4.1.8) ...
In a busy few weeks, my little ReadyNAS Duo's performance seems to have halved at a stroke. The problem seems to be a consequence of upgrading to RAIDiator 4.1.8 (release) and performing a full factory reset but ... just in case ... here's a full rundown of its recent life ...
* After swapping my ageing PC for a shiny new iMac (really shiny, by the way), I noticed a very modest (but welcome) *increase* in performance from the ReadyNAS.
* Running Windows 7 (directly through Boot Camp, fully Windows Update'd) and RAIDiator 4.1.8 beta (for Lion compatibility) the little Duo could saturate my Gigabit Ethernet to 25-30% (transferring data at around 250-300Mb/s, then). Everything was running great ...
* Then a mini-disaster ... after three years use the ReadyNAS power supply gave up. The unit shut down without warning and wouldn't power up again.
* Some excellent online support put me back on track. "Some time later" and with a new power supply connected (an identical Netgear part) I was up and running again.
* The unit started first time and all was well ... everything was accessible and usable ... but restarting the unit once more (from front-view) the ReadyNAS unexpectedly froze on boot.
* Blue light flashing at 1Hz, fan at medium-volume, no activity or drive lights and invisible to RAIDar, I gave it four/five hours ...
* Not responding to physical (power) button presses, I had to pull the plug. Fortunately, the unit picked itself up and booted without issue. Scouring downloaded log's I could see *no trace whatsoever* of the failed boot.
* To eliminate any possibility of data corruption or similar badness (and with a new release-version of RAIDiator 4.1.8 now available) I updated the unit firmware, performed full factory reset and reconfigured the unit to match its old settings (all from front-view). Perhaps this was a beta glitch?
* Now running solidly and without issue, I copied data back to the unit using Windows Explorer and a local backup. It should have close to zero fragmentation, then.
Doing this, it was clear performance had halved. The unit now saturates just 10-15% of the network ... transferring at around 100-150Mb/s only (no RAIDar or front-view pages open).
This doesn't look like a hardware problem ... the drives look fine (a matched Seagate ST3500630AS pair, their SMART reports look good and their temps are normal), the network looks fine (private LAN, both Mac (on-board Broadcom NetXtreme) and NAS are wired to the same Netgear WNDR3700 (gigabit router, latest firmware), no concerning errors ... a few TCP retransmits which are not unusual) and there are no errors or warnings in the logs. But for a new power adapter, nothing has changed hardware-wise.
The old and new front-view settings match near-exactly (same network settings, same shares, same users and access rights, one or two *fewer* services running than before, no bittorrent/photo's/remote/vault, full data journaling, oplocks enabled, fast CIFS writes enabled, jumbo frames disabled), the unit isn't resynching or indexing media, there are no scheduled backup jobs (internal or time machine) and ... to be absolutely sure ... I've also confirmed performance several times over the last week to eliminate any other invisible, transient activity ... no luck :?
Performance seems to have halved at a stroke with no clear reason.
It looks very much like a RAIDiator 4.1.8 issue but I'm happy to help troubleshoot. Any chance a Jedi (or other expert) can help?
Thanks,
Justin
* After swapping my ageing PC for a shiny new iMac (really shiny, by the way), I noticed a very modest (but welcome) *increase* in performance from the ReadyNAS.
* Running Windows 7 (directly through Boot Camp, fully Windows Update'd) and RAIDiator 4.1.8 beta (for Lion compatibility) the little Duo could saturate my Gigabit Ethernet to 25-30% (transferring data at around 250-300Mb/s, then). Everything was running great ...
* Then a mini-disaster ... after three years use the ReadyNAS power supply gave up. The unit shut down without warning and wouldn't power up again.
* Some excellent online support put me back on track. "Some time later" and with a new power supply connected (an identical Netgear part) I was up and running again.
* The unit started first time and all was well ... everything was accessible and usable ... but restarting the unit once more (from front-view) the ReadyNAS unexpectedly froze on boot.
* Blue light flashing at 1Hz, fan at medium-volume, no activity or drive lights and invisible to RAIDar, I gave it four/five hours ...
* Not responding to physical (power) button presses, I had to pull the plug. Fortunately, the unit picked itself up and booted without issue. Scouring downloaded log's I could see *no trace whatsoever* of the failed boot.
* To eliminate any possibility of data corruption or similar badness (and with a new release-version of RAIDiator 4.1.8 now available) I updated the unit firmware, performed full factory reset and reconfigured the unit to match its old settings (all from front-view). Perhaps this was a beta glitch?
* Now running solidly and without issue, I copied data back to the unit using Windows Explorer and a local backup. It should have close to zero fragmentation, then.
Doing this, it was clear performance had halved. The unit now saturates just 10-15% of the network ... transferring at around 100-150Mb/s only (no RAIDar or front-view pages open).
This doesn't look like a hardware problem ... the drives look fine (a matched Seagate ST3500630AS pair, their SMART reports look good and their temps are normal), the network looks fine (private LAN, both Mac (on-board Broadcom NetXtreme) and NAS are wired to the same Netgear WNDR3700 (gigabit router, latest firmware), no concerning errors ... a few TCP retransmits which are not unusual) and there are no errors or warnings in the logs. But for a new power adapter, nothing has changed hardware-wise.
The old and new front-view settings match near-exactly (same network settings, same shares, same users and access rights, one or two *fewer* services running than before, no bittorrent/photo's/remote/vault, full data journaling, oplocks enabled, fast CIFS writes enabled, jumbo frames disabled), the unit isn't resynching or indexing media, there are no scheduled backup jobs (internal or time machine) and ... to be absolutely sure ... I've also confirmed performance several times over the last week to eliminate any other invisible, transient activity ... no luck :?
Performance seems to have halved at a stroke with no clear reason.
It looks very much like a RAIDiator 4.1.8 issue but I'm happy to help troubleshoot. Any chance a Jedi (or other expert) can help?
Thanks,
Justin
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- Still running with one disk, I decided to bite the bullet and downgrade to 4.1.7 again ... if only for educational value. As I've kept my existing volumes, configuration and data this time, this isn't virgin 4.1.7 per se but it should be good for reference.
While there's a noticeable increase in performance, it isn't anywhere near pre-4.1.8 levels ...
CIFS (1 disk)
Read: ~19 MB/s (unchanged)
Write: ~12 Mb/s (higher than the previous 10 MB/s)
NFS (1 disk, 1 thread, sync mode enabled)
Read: ~15 MB/s (higher than the previous 11 MB/s)
Write: ~9 MB/s (higher than the previous 8 MB/s)
A factory reset may well help but that would introduce variables I'd hoped to avoid ... data would be laid out differently on-disk and (while the impact should be fairly subtle as the same data is being restored as previously and fragmentation is being eliminated in the process) performance characteristics would undoubtedly change.
If the earlier 4.1.8 factory reset had changed things like partition layout/alignment for the worse (an example out of the air, I'm not suggesting it has) the changes would still be affecting the downgraded system.
Thanks,
Justin
Update: second disk replaced and resynched ... performance is pretty much the identical. Guess there's little-to-no performance advantage to running two disks in XRAID. - When reverting back to 4.1.7 from 4.1.8 I didn't perform a factory reset again, just re-installed 4.1.7 and all seemed good.
- I'm going to try reverting back to 4.1.7 and see if that makes any difference.
On factor is that chaner didn't update to the 4.1.8 beta whilst both me and Justin S did, so it seems the performance decrease has something to do with the beta. knorrhane wrote: I'm going to try reverting back to 4.1.7 and see if that makes any difference.
On factor is that chaner didn't update to the 4.1.8 beta whilst both me and Justin S did, so it seems the performance decrease has something to do with the beta.
Could be, Knorrhane. Will be really interesting to see if it improves your performance more than mine. The upgrade/downgrade process is thankfully fairly straightforward.
Justin- With the 4.1.7 downgrade I got ~20 Mb/s read and write using AFP and after upgrading to 4.1.8 I get about the same performance as Justin S so at least now I don't have the painfully slow write speed using AFP.
It's still not as good as it was though. - I know this thread is about ReadyNAS DUO, and I don't want to derail the thread, but I also wanted to share my identical experience with my NV+.
I recently purchased a NV+ myself. . and upon setting it up, I immediately upgraded to 4.1.8 . . After taking a couple days to get data moved etc. . . it was quit painful as to how slow it was. . after some digging and testing, I saw I was only getting around 8-9 MB/s write and 10Mb/s read. . After reading this thread I downgraded back to 4.1.7 and BAM. It was like my NV+ got unleashed. I am now getting 30+MB/s read and 20+ MB/s write.
I definitely believe 4.1.8 has a SERIOUS performance bug in it. If anyone on this board has an engineer's ear at Netgear they may want to whisper in it. . Any firmware that involves a 50-60% performance hit has major problems and probably should be pulled from distribution ASAP.
As for me I will not be moving from 4.1.7 until this is confirmed fixed even though a large portion of my machine base is OSX Lion.
Hope the info from this experience helps.
TLDR - If you have performance issues and are running 4.1.8 . . try downgrading to 4.1.7. - Since I use OS X Lion on several computers that's not a solution for me. I guess we need to wait for 4.1.9 for this to be fixed..
knorrhane wrote: Since I use OS X Lion on several computers that's not a solution for me. I guess we need to wait for 4.1.9 for this to be fixed..
All my Lion machines can connect through cifs and afp just fine. The only thing I've noticed that broke is that you can't access the NAS from the NASNAME (CIFS) icon from the network group in the finder panel on the left, you have to use the one that doesn't specify (CIFS) or (AFP).
The only feature that gets broke I think may be Time Machine support. As far as I can tell that could be the only game breaker for downgrading back to 4.1.7.
But as far as pure raw connectivity my Lion machines access it fine and perform much better in reads and writes with 4.1.7 in place and I use CIFS to do so.- Any news on your downgrade, Knorrhane? Have you seen performance restored?
Any news on your downgrade, Knorrhane? Have you seen performance restored?
Nope, see my post at the top.The only feature that gets broke I think may be Time Machine support. As far as I can tell that could be the only game breaker for downgrading back to 4.1.7.
Yes, that's true. However since I do use Time Machine I wouldn't like to downgrade. Before I did the downgrade-upgrade I had about 6Mb/s write speed using AFP and now I have about 12 Mb/s which isn't as good as it was but sufficient for my needs but very annoying since I know the potential.
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