Why can't I get better than 1gb performance bonding NIC's on my ReadyNAS Pro 6?

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Retired_Member wrote:

you also might want to try "adaptive load balancing" as the teaming mode.

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Worth a try, but I'd try the static lag/round robin approach first.

On the NAS->switch path, ALB (and TLB) will dynamically adjust the traffic balance between NICs.  Round-Robin will give the same performance when all the ethernet links in the LAG are the same speed.

On the switch->NAS path, ALB selects a NIC at the beginning of the traffic flow (based on NIC loading at the time).  That NIC is used for the life of the traffic flow.  There are still some scenarios where the receive flows aren't well balanced, since the NAS can't shift an on-going flow to another NIC.  That shouldn't happen with static LAG (though I haven't seen any information from Netgear on how the switches load-balance in the that direction).

So the net here is that ALB should be about the same as round-robin/static LAG for downloads from the NAS, but that it won't be quite as good for uploads to the NAS.  The simple iperf test might not show the difference in upload performance, but it will still show up in real-world use.

LACP is generally used to serve as a "trunk' that carries lots of connections.  It works well in those situations, and has the benefit that it won't overrun a single gigabit client connection (though it will overrun wifi or fast ethernet client connections).  But with just a couple of client connections it will often under-utilitize some of the links.