Improving Gigabit network performance

[Keriokie2000]

I have a wired home network with 12 desktops, 1 Xbox360, 1 Wii, and 2 servers all running through a Dell Powerconnect 2624 (edited from 2324) gigabit switch. A Linksys 310wrt router is connected to a port for Internet.

1 server is a Windows Home Server (6TB file server and backup storage)
- Athlon FX53, MSI Master2-Far, 2 GB ECC Server Memory, 1TB Spinpoint HDD work drive, 4x1.5TB storage drives on a Promise TX4-300 Raid controller
1 server is a Beyond TV HDTV server (tuners and 2TB local storage)
- Q6600, Asus P5K Deluxe, 2GB DDR2-800, 320GB HDD system drive, 4x500GB RAID0 storage
DVD/Bluray computer
- E6600, Asus P5N32-SLI, 4GB DDR2-800, 150GB Raptor system drive, 2x74GB Raptor RAID0 content drive

The network is fine for streaming HDTV from the TV Server, and DVD/Bluray content from the Home Server to any of the desktops or XBox. The biggest problem is the time it takes to backup the 2TB storage (mostly 3GB files) from the TV server to the Home Server, and DVD/Bluray rips from a desktop to the Home Server. The transfers seem to be capped at 10-17 MB/s no matter the source or destination. The servers and desktops all use Intel 1000BT/Pro NICs. The cables are all Cat 6 installed and tested by a local network company run from wall outlets to a punchdown rack. Cables from the computers to the outlets, and from the punchdown to the switch, are all factory terminated Cat 6. Motherboard networking is disabled. All hard drives are SATA-II except the 2x74GB raptors connected to motherboard SATA connectors, and the Home Server uses a Promise TX4-300 PCI raid card with the RAID disabled.

I believe I read somewhere that the Powerconnect 2624 switch does not support jumbo frames and wondered if that could be a big bottleneck for the transfer speeds. So, I was thinking of replacing the entire switch (about $250--could use a recommendation) OR getting an additional 5 port switch (about $30) that supports jumbo frames and only connect the 2 servers and 1 desktop to it, and that switch connect to the 2624.

Which switch sounds better, or should I look at something else to improve speed?

 

[Crusty]

Avoid using SMB for large transfers like that, it has a lot of overhead. Not sure how you are doing it currently, but perhaps try using FTP to get faster speeds.

 

[JackMDS]

As far as my experience goes some Entry Level Switches Do not work well and "stifle" traffic.

I mange to "Squeeze" Transfer of 50MB/sec. to 58MB/sec. by using this Switch. ( http://www.newegg.com/Product/...x?Item=N82E16833156251 ).

Using Windows regular protocols (No SMB).

Optimizing the TCP/IP of each computer according to the Internet connection and setting the RCwin to double what the recommended RCwin.

This free util. can help in Optimizing and setting RCwin, http://www.speedguide.net/downloads.php

 

[Madwand1]

Originally posted by: Keriokie2000
I have a wired home network with 12 desktops, 1 Xbox360, 1 Wii, and 2 servers all running through a Dell Powerconnect 2324 gigabit switch. A Linksys 310wrt router is connected to a port for Internet.

The 2324 is really a 10/100 switch with a couple of gigabit ports, so could stand upgrading. The 2716 combined with the gigabit ports on the router would get you all-gigabit capability with enough ports for your current network.

Just getting an 8-port gigabit switch would be cheaper and get you 7 usable gigabit ports in addition to the 3 on the router.

Choosing between these is pretty much a pricing + layout + utility decision for yourself.

If you actually meant that you have the 2724, then it should be fine, and have jumbo frame support via a firmware upgrade and switch to managed mode at most.

File transfer performance is much more complex than the choice of networking hardware. To find out how your network is performing, I suggest using iperf version 1.7. E.g.

server: iperf -s
client: iperf -c server -l 64k -t 15 -i 3 -r

where server is the name or IP of the remote machine running iperf -s.

 

[cparker]

Your problem may have nothing to do with your network. It might have to do with the time it takes for the WHS to process the incoming data and distribute it among the drives. I'm saying this because I made some experiments with my own WHS gigabit network setup. Copying 4-8 gigabyte files to the server's storage pool goes at 17 MB/sec. Copying the same file back to the computer goes at 56-61 MB/sec. These results were with jumbo frames enabled. Copying the same file between two computers also goes at that same faster speed. At first I hadn't had jumbo frames enabled on any of my network adapters. After enabling jumbo frames the speed increased approximately 4 MB/sec on the fast end, didn't improve anything significantly on the slow 17 MB/sec end.

I am using pci gigabit adapters on the two client PCs along with some older SATA 1 drives on a 4-5 year old motherboard, so I might be losing some speed because of the slower hard drives and possible pci bottlenecks, although the 56-61 MB/sec is perfectly fine for my needs. The adapters are Encore, 10 dollar ones, with Realtek innards. The switch I'm using is a Dlink "green" 5 port gigabit switch. I also have the Trendnet 8 port one which I'll try out one of these days as they get great ratings.

Based on my experiments, getting a switch that's jumbo frames capable will help little, if any, on improving the speed copying your files to the server to the storage pool.

I'm no guru on any of this, but I had similar questions as to speed copying backups to the WHS and did these experiments to try to clarify things.

 

[Keriokie2000]

First, the switch is a 2624 not 2324. And I use Robocopy (manual command line for DVD rips, scheduled nightly batch job for HDTV) to copy stuff as I found out long ago that drag and drop in Windows Explorer tended to frequently corrupt pictures and video. Results of iPerf:

Client connecting to filestore, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 8.00 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[364] local 192.168.1.101 port 49685 connected with 192.168.1.112 port 5001
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[364] 0.0- 3.0 sec 119 MBytes 333 Mbits/sec
[364] 3.0- 6.0 sec 162 MBytes 452 Mbits/sec
[364] 6.0- 9.0 sec 221 MBytes 618 Mbits/sec
[364] 9.0-12.0 sec 222 MBytes 619 Mbits/sec
[364] 12.0-15.0 sec 222 MBytes 620 Mbits/sec
[364] 0.0-15.0 sec 945 MBytes 528 Mbits/sec
[332] local 192.168.1.101 port 5001 connected with 192.168.1.112 port 1522
[ ID] Interval Transfer Bandwidth
[332] 0.0- 3.0 sec 48.9 MBytes 137 Mbits/sec
[332] 0.0- 3.0 sec 410 Mbits 137 Mbits/sec

This is from a desktop to the Home Server with similar results from the HDTV server and other desktops. So, I guess it is the WHS drive system that slows everything down. I thought using a large fast HDD as the work drive would all files to be stored quickly before the system moved them to the raid drives later.

Thanks for the feedback. I will look at WHS to see if I can work around to get that speed up.