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Pro Pioneer NFS performance problem
For as long as I've had it I've been using NFS on the Pro Pioneer to serve video files to various media players in my house (a Dune HD Base 3.0, a TViX 4100, a Popcorn Hour A-100) with excellent results and no performance issues.
Abruptly, for no reason that I can determine, video files served over NFS by the ReadyNAS are unplayable on any of the media players. Playback stutters and freezes, with multi-second pauses between frames--that's when playback starts at all. This behavior is the same on all three of the media players that are using NFS. Yet the same files served from the Pro via ReadyDLNA (to a PS3) play back perfectly, with no stuttering or any other problems, suggesting that network performance is not an issue.
Nothing has changed in the ReadyNAS configuration as far as I can tell, nor in the configuration of any of the media players. The Pro has six Seagate 2 TB drives configured as X-RAID2, and the SMART status displayed by Frontview shows no disk errors on any of them. The array is 60% full.
I've rebooted the ReadyNAS multiple times without any effect on this performance problem, and I also just updated to the latest 4.2.20 beta (T19) just in case (since the release notes mentioned an NFS enhancement), but the playback stuttering persists.
How can I troubleshoot this further? The ReadyNAS is almost unusable in this state.
Abruptly, for no reason that I can determine, video files served over NFS by the ReadyNAS are unplayable on any of the media players. Playback stutters and freezes, with multi-second pauses between frames--that's when playback starts at all. This behavior is the same on all three of the media players that are using NFS. Yet the same files served from the Pro via ReadyDLNA (to a PS3) play back perfectly, with no stuttering or any other problems, suggesting that network performance is not an issue.
Nothing has changed in the ReadyNAS configuration as far as I can tell, nor in the configuration of any of the media players. The Pro has six Seagate 2 TB drives configured as X-RAID2, and the SMART status displayed by Frontview shows no disk errors on any of them. The array is 60% full.
I've rebooted the ReadyNAS multiple times without any effect on this performance problem, and I also just updated to the latest 4.2.20 beta (T19) just in case (since the release notes mentioned an NFS enhancement), but the playback stuttering persists.
How can I troubleshoot this further? The ReadyNAS is almost unusable in this state.
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- I can't see any mention of an NFS improvement in the 4.2.20 beta release notes.
What's your thread count for NFS like (under Services > Standard File Protocols > NFS in Frontview)? Does the stuttering occur when only one unit is accessing the NAS over NFS or only when multiple units are accessing over NFS at the same time? - Do you see any network errors on the NAS?
mdgm wrote: I can't see any mention of an NFS improvement in the 4.2.20 beta release notes.
You're right, I read too quickly (it's an NTP enhancement, not NFS).What's your thread count for NFS like (under Services > Standard File Protocols > NFS in Frontview)?
Thread count is 2, which it's always been. I haven't tried fiddling with this setting yet.Does the stuttering occur when only one unit is accessing the NAS over NFS or only when multiple units are accessing over NFS at the same time?
Happens with only one unit accessing the NAS over NFS.StephenB wrote: Do you see any network errors on the NAS?
Nothing in the Frontview-displayable logs that I can see. But maybe I'm looking in the wrong place. Where would I find additional logs? (I haven't enabled ssh access on this box.)- choose network on the left, you should see a "show errors" button on the right next the the ethernet status
- Nothing much there. TX packets a little over one million, RX packets a little over two million, "RX errors" is 45. All other counts are zero.
- Resolved this after a few back-and-forth exchanges with Netgear support. The culprit was the Netgear GS724TR gigabit switch that was recently put into service. The SMC8524T that it replaced is an unmanaged switch; the Netgear is a managed switch. The flow control setting on the Netgear was "disabled" (by default), and this was killing the performance of NFS over UDP. NFS over TCP, on the other hand, was working fine, which was an important clue. But using NFS-over-TCP exclusively is not an option since one of the media players, the TViX 4100, doesn't support it.
Enabling flow-control on the Netgear switch corrected the issue and "streaming" NFS performance is now fine both over TCP and over UDP. rrg wrote: The culprit was the Netgear GS724TR gigabit switch that was recently put into service. The SMC8524T that it replaced is an unmanaged switch; the Netgear is a managed switch. The flow control setting on the Netgear was "disabled" (by default), and this was killing the performance of NFS over UDP.
Enabling flow-control on the Netgear switch corrected the issue and "streaming" NFS performance is now fine both over TCP and over UDP.
Perhaps I need to check the 4200's and 3100's that I have connected to GS724TR switches via NFS to Xen hosts. Good to see this post.
Was this specific to the GS724TR? In other words, were you able to try a different managed switch with flow control disabled as well? What firmware were you running, and did they advise you upgrade it? (There have been quite a few updates to the GS724TR software).
It's been my understanding for years that flow control produces more undesirable results on average.
I've seen that posted, but in my experience it is not true. Packet Loss results in a steep decline in TCP speeds, which can destroy performance. I discovered that when streaming HD video to my NTV550. With flow control off, there was a lot of stuttering. Turning on flow control immediately solved the problem.russrtw wrote: It's been my understanding for years that flow control produces more undesirable results on average. russrtw wrote: Perhaps I need to check the 4200's and 3100's that I have connected to GS724TR switches via NFS to Xen hosts. Good to see this post.
Was this specific to the GS724TR? In other words, were you able to try a different managed switch with flow control disabled as well? What firmware were you running, and did they advise you upgrade it? (There have been quite a few updates to the GS724TR software).
It's been my understanding for years that flow control produces more undesirable results on average.
I didn't have another managed switch to try so I don't know how another might have behaved.
They advised me to upgrade to the latest switch firmware (which I was already on anyway) before turning on flow control.
I hadn't deliberately turned it off prior to this, so "off" was likely the default setting. So yes, it did surprise me when they suggested the change.
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