ReadyNAS 3200

Ok, I think I've just solved my own problem, I've gone into the rack with my laptop and done the test directly through the gigabit switch that the NAS (& VM Cluster) is connected too, and the performance has rocketed. Interestingly though, with Jumbo Frames on I get LOWER read/write performance than with it disabled in my network card configuration.

ON: 37 MB/s Read 62MB/s Write
OFF: 60MB/s Read 80MB/s Write

Hi smansfield.

There is a newer firmware available: http://www.readynas.com/RAIDiator_x86_4_2_21_Notes

Yes it does sound like there is some issue on your network.

As for Jumbo Frames, many find it's more trouble than what it's worth to use. You need all of the NAS, PC and switch to support jumbo frames and have the feature enabled. Also a good idea to ensure the NIC drivers for the NIC in your PC are up to date.

Note that if you use Jumbo Frames you need to make sure that the MTU is set correctly: http://help.expedient.com/broadband/mtu_ping_test.shtml

The performance numbers you mention with the connection via the switch would also be affected by the drive in your laptop. The hard drive in the laptop is almost certainly the bottleneck on performance.

Looking at your volume capacity it appears you are using X-RAID2 dual-redundancy (RAID-6). I do recommend using dual-redundancy and this does provide good peace of mind. If any two disks fail data remains intact. Important data primarily stored on the ReadyNAS should still be backed up regularly. See Preventing Catastrophic Data Loss

Do note that the performance article you linked to was written quite some time ago now, back before the x86 (Intel) line of ReadyNAS products was released. Many things are still the same, but some things have changed. Obviously the x86 ReadyNASes are much faster and more powerful than the discontinued Sparc line. Also the "Disable Journaling" option mentioned in the article is no longer present in x86 firmware as it's obsolete.

Welcome to the forum!

mdgm wrote:
...Also the "Disable Journaling" option mentioned in the article is no longer present in x86 firmware as it's obsolete...

"Disable full data journaling" appears on my Pro under system/performance. Was this just removed in 4.2.21? (I am still on 4.2.20).

StephenB I said "Disable Journaling". "Disable Journaling" is obsolete not "Disable Full Data Journaling".

mdgm wrote:
StephenB I said "Disable Journaling". "Disable Journaling" is obsolete not "Disable Full Data Journaling".

Though of course "disable full data journaling"is related and will still help write performance. I wouldn't recommend doing that unless you have a UPS though.

The reason why I'm wondering about performance is because I'm getting some pretty awful numbers back from the VMware management console, like:



A seven second read delay is just completely un-acceptable. It causes the virtual machine to stall / lock-up.

I should mention that this is connected via NFS with 1 NFS thread on the ReadyNAS 3200 selected.

What happens if you increase the thread count?

Even worse!! I put it up to 4 threads.



That's over 10,000ms of latency!

Looks to me like average write latency went down with more threads, but average read latency went up.

Though the different scales make it hard to tell, it seems to me that typical requests are serviced much more quickly in the second chart, with the two massive spikes between 16:00 and 16:05 as exceptions.

Are you using a script to drive this, or is it an uncontrolled test?

This is just a sample from a virtual machine running on the ReadyNAS 3200, it's a web server, and it's under little to no-load at all. In fact the whole system is under next to no load at all, yet it's really noticeable when these latency spikes happen; the whole system just completely freezes.

I'm not doing anything in particular to generate these results, this is a fairly standard normal operating result-set. It makes the entire system unusable, to the point at which we are thinking of returning the ReadyNAS 3200 if we can't sort this issue out; the VMs must be able to run and serve data to clients without a 10 second delay.