Freenas + ZFS Build

Krobar: do you know what the CPU usage is caused by? Reading from a single disk should be 1-3% cpu usage; somthing must be wrong in your particular setup.

That also counts for Samba; some don't even get 1MB/s on a gigabit network, some get 10MB/s, some get 100MB/s. For me, i tried tuning Samba but never gotten it to perform like NFS does; close to 100MB/s. Lots of times Samba is something in between 5-35MB/s. It appears this is an issue specific to Samba. It's one of the worst open source projects ever - so many years of development and still they cannot produce a simple filesharing service that simply works.

Samba is into all the "enterprise" stuff though. Me, i just want access to my files. Scr*w your active directory primary domain master whatever. I want access to file X and i want it now not tomorrow. A complete rewrite of Samba into a 15KB application that performs like it should, would be the best solution in my eyes. None of the current Samba devs should participate, or they'll f*ck this up once more.

Because of Samba performing so poor (especially on FreeBSD distributions), FreeNAS is also looking to migrate to the Linux kernel; all this because of one crappy software project.

@Krobar: what exactly do you mean with "BSD implementation of Samba"? Samba is a piece of sourcecode, it can be compiled on Linux and on BSD; still the same implementation. It just behaves differently on FreeBSD than on Linux. But Samba and performance problems go hand-in-hand; just google how much questions are regarding this.
 
sub.mesa said:
Krobar: do you know what the CPU usage is caused by? Reading from a single disk should be 1-3% cpu usage; somthing must be wrong in your particular setup.

That also counts for Samba; some don't even get 1MB/s on a gigabit network, some get 10MB/s, some get 100MB/s. For me, i tried tuning Samba but never gotten it to perform like NFS does; close to 100MB/s. Lots of times Samba is something in between 5-35MB/s. It appears this is an issue specific to Samba. It's one of the worst open source projects ever - so many years of development and still they cannot produce a simple filesharing service that simply works.

Samba is into all the "enterprise" stuff though. Me, i just want access to my files. Scr*w your active directory primary domain master whatever. I want access to file X and i want it now not tomorrow. A complete rewrite of Samba into a 15KB application that performs like it should, would be the best solution in my eyes. None of the current Samba devs should participate, or they'll f*ck this up once more.

Because of Samba performing so poor (especially on FreeBSD distributions), FreeNAS is also looking to migrate to the Linux kernel; all this because of one crappy software project.

@Krobar: what exactly do you mean with "BSD implementation of Samba"? Samba is a piece of sourcecode, it can be compiled on Linux and on BSD; still the same implementation. It just behaves differently on FreeBSD than on Linux. But Samba and performance problems go hand-in-hand; just google how much questions are regarding this.
Click to expand...

Hi SubM,

I didnt check the cause of the CPU usage in Freenas, I assume it is set to only allow a process 50% of the CPU (The CPU is only single core) as it was pegged at 50%. I'm still deciding on an OS for the job and will test again once I have a 10 disk hardware Raid6 array installed. The only reason I want decent write performance is I want to copy 4 Blurays at once direct to the NAS which means I needs about 80MB/sec+ write performance.

By Samba implementation I simply mean its performance under BSD. In my case an out of the box Centos install performed much better with CIFs than FreeNAS. I should note I attempted no tweaking at all in Centos. In FreeNAS I enabled athe optimised kernel and a couple of the other performance options for Samba all of which helped me reach 45MB/s but did nothing about the what I consider excessive CPU usage. It could well be network drivers or the network stack causing the problem but I know for some uses like squid BSD is generally preferred which suggests the BSD network stack is generally pretty good and hence why I point the finger at Samba under BSD.

I have seen some really impressive CIFs performance scaling number on Infiniband with OpenSolaris. Something like 2.2Gbyte/sec for CIFS, more for NFS and better again for NFS-RDMA. All of this points to OpenSolaris having a scalable CIFs stack, although not necessarily the most effficient (Hardware used was a quad opteron with 128GB RAM and lots of raid storage) but with this and decent ZFS support is it only ease of use that is stopping it being used for a home NAS?
 
Intel GBE (An onboard PCI-E-X1 one so I think it uses the newer of the two Intel GBE drivers in Linux).
 
I should be able to give some insight into CIFS/NFS performance here in a little wile. Box at home is running CIFS right now and I constantly pull 50-60MB/s off it... and ~45MB/s write. Thats off a single Raidz2 array as well (effectivly Raid6) Though I plan to play with NFS a bit and see if the performance is a bit better.

This is all on OpenSolaris BTW.
 
Hi Tau,

Thanks for the update, 45MB write seems a bit low (Assuming you have a half decent raid array)
 
Will soon be able to test with a 10 drive Raid6 array. This Build/Verify is taking a while......
 
man oh man.. Everything here is like super overkill for FreeNas.. Try this.. Onboard its only got 2 sata, but use the PCI slot for an extra SATA controller card. You wont need anything high end as it wont need a hardware controller. But it has onboard Gbe lan & if you search ebay/google for z-u130 you can find a USBish SSD thingy mady by intel that conencted to one of the usb pinouts on the motherboard. Remember with freenas capacity isnt squat for the boot drive. I ordered one of those for 25 bucks new off ebay in 1GB flavor..

So to Budget 600 bucks to a FreeNas it would be like this. that gives you a total of 3TB capacity to begin with a bit left over to upgrade the case (I prefer the Antec 300). or get setup for the popular CF boot meathod or snag one of the intel usb SSD's (z-u130) from ebay.

This is basically the setup I have & I also use it to trans-code video using PyTivo.
 
bastage said:
man oh man.. Everything here is like super overkill for FreeNas.. Try this.. Onboard its only got 2 sata, but use the PCI slot for an extra SATA controller card. You wont need anything high end as it wont need a hardware controller. But it has onboard Gbe lan & if you search ebay/google for z-u130 you can find a USBish SSD thingy mady by intel that conencted to one of the usb pinouts on the motherboard. Remember with freenas capacity isnt squat for the boot drive. I ordered one of those for 25 bucks new off ebay in 1GB flavor..
Click to expand...

Seriously? That 4-port SATA controller eats up any cost gain over the Celeron E3300 + DG43NB solution I proposed - plus some. And you totally kneecap performance with the slow CPU, crappy Realtek NIC and PCI bus. Not to mention you can't easily go past 6 ports.
 
MetricGnome said:
@sub.mesa - Ever get a chance to test out the WDEARS drives?
Click to expand...
Sorry about the delay. I'll check today alright. Probably in the evening. :)

Note that i don't test with actual EARS drives; but rather check how FreeNAS creates partitions and if this would cause any problems for 4KiB sector drives - such as the EARS.
 
Those of you using 12port+ cards or expanders might want to be careful of the EARS drives, Adaptec told me they werent showing up on a lot of expander based setups.
 
keenan said:
Seriously? That 4-port SATA controller eats up any cost gain over the Celeron E3300 + DG43NB solution I proposed - plus some. And you totally kneecap performance with the slow CPU, crappy Realtek NIC and PCI bus. Not to mention you can't easily go past 6 ports.
Click to expand...

kneecap performance of freenas... Have you ever used it before??

Minimum requirements
To run FreeNAS, you will need, at a minimum, the following:

Motherboard with x86 processor
128 MB RAM
32 MB free disk space
Network card
BIOS that supports bootable CD-ROMs
Another workstation with a modern web browser and access to the network FreeNAS is on
Click to expand...

there is a reason there so vague & thats that it will run fine on pretty much anything.. I had freenas trans-coding HD video on a 1.2 ghz tbird with 512 mg ram.. There is seriously no reason to have more hardware then an atom..

Next off my point in an Atom wasn't to save cost on the hardware upfront. It was to save cost over time.. Makes it cheaper to keep on 24/7 & also due to the passive cooling on that thing there are no fans even to eventually start making noise & die. For something you want to run 24/7 and not have to monitor I personally dont think anything beats an atom.. Also there are motherboards that may be better suited for most avail on the egg as well.. there is a jetway with an atom 330 thats a flex atx form factor that has 2 pci & a pci express.. Not to mention that the OP would probably be fine with a much cheaper card then the one I linked. I am using a syba with a sil3124 chipset that was like 30 bucks on the egg..
 
bastage said:
kneecap performance of freenas... Have you ever used it before??
Click to expand...
... Of course. Realtek NICs perform terribly in FreeBSD and are flaky as hell. And PCI bus contention alone means you'll be lucky to get over 50MB/s, ignoring the slow CPU and crappy NIC.

Minimum requirements
Click to expand...
emphasis mine

Yes, FreeNAS will run on pretty much anything, like most *nix appliances. Expecting it to perform well on such a system using advanced filesystems like ZFS and parity striping is either naive or just plain dumb.

there is a reason there so vague & thats that it will run fine on pretty much anything.. I had freenas trans-coding HD video on a 1.2 ghz tbird with 512 mg ram.. There is seriously no reason to have more hardware then an atom..
Click to expand...
I haven't tried it, but I'd be very surprised if Atom can come close to saturating GigE with FreeNAS + ZFS RAIDz. Or even RAID5. Even with a proper PCIe NIC and SATA controllers. There is an argument to be made for a low power consumption solution, but there are certainly tradeoffs involved... don't act like everyone else's suggestions are idiotic because you have chosen to optimize your build for power consumption and not performance or flexibility. And yes, you could do a relatively good Atom system too, but either price goes up (significantly, to something like the Supermicro Atom boards) or quality goes way down (Jetway). And performance is still probably not going to be great.
 
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keenan said:
... Of course. Realtek NICs perform terribly in FreeBSD and are flaky as hell. And PCI bus contention alone means you'll be lucky to get over 50MB/s, ignoring the slow CPU and crappy NIC.


emphasis mine

Yes, FreeNAS will run on pretty much anything, like most *nix appliances. Expecting it to perform well on such a system using advanced filesystems like ZFS and parity striping is either naive or just plain dumb.


I haven't tried it, but I'd be very surprised if Atom can come close to saturating GigE with FreeNAS + ZFS RAIDz. Or even RAID5. Even with a proper PCIe NIC and SATA controllers. There is an argument to be made for a low power consumption solution, but there are certainly tradeoffs involved... don't act like everyone else's suggestions are idiotic because you have chosen to optimize your build for power consumption and not performance or flexibility. And yes, you could do a relatively good Atom system too, but either price goes up (significantly, to something like the Supermicro Atom boards) or quality goes way down (Jetway). And performance is still probably not going to be great.
Click to expand...

to quote the OP
1) What will you be doing with this PC? Gaming? Photoshop? Web browsing? etc
Personal file/media server
Click to expand...
for personal use what are you going to be doing to saturate the GBe?.. I Can stream 1080p & it doesn't saturate the 10/100 I have ran throughout my house.. So again why do you think it needs more then an atom.. This isn't going in a data center or anything like that as far as I can tell.. & if it was then it would probably br opensolaris or atleast a full blown freeBSD, not FreeNAS
 
bastage said:
for personal use what are you going to be doing to saturate the GBe?.. I Can stream 1080p & it doesn't saturate the 10/100 I have ran throughout my house.. So again why do you think it needs more then an atom.. This isn't going in a data center or anything like that as far as I can tell.. & if it was then it would probably br opensolaris or atleast a full blown freeBSD, not FreeNAS
Click to expand...

How do you get the files onto the box in the first place...

Copying files sucks. The faster the better. And for basically the same money and a few bucks a year in power, you can reach the 'performance a home user can afford' plateau. But more importantly, you can expand the box as needed.
 
keenan said:
How do you get the files onto the box in the first place...

Copying files sucks. The faster the better. And for basically the same money and a few bucks a year in power, you can reach the 'performance a home user can afford' plateau. But more importantly, you can expand the box as needed.
Click to expand...

The file speed onto the server is limited by my internet connection. & That few bucks a year gains you almost nothing.. My argument is not that the atom is as fast of a CPU as the celeron.. Is that the OS is so light it doesn't make much of a difference at all with ANY modern cpu.. & Since there is no noticeable performance gain, why not get a noticeable advantage in power consumption. & Also as I said the intel board I linked may not be to everyones liking. It was picked based off of base feature set & that its using one of the newer atom d510's (a little faster & more power friendly then the atom 330).. For feature's this. is even better. But a little higher priced. Although if you drop the sata card I linked in my original list it would be about the same price & give allot more future expansion as well as the dual GBe nic's..
 
bastage said:
The file speed onto the server is limited by my internet connection.
Click to expand...
Not everyone is a dirty pirate like you :p And if it's an Atom box you're not exactly going to want to encode your BluRays on it. Even 100MB/s is too slow when you're copying a 30GB BD image. :)

My argument is not that the atom is as fast of a CPU as the celeron.. Is that the OS is so light it doesn't make much of a difference at all with ANY modern cpu.. & Since there is no noticeable performance gain
Click to expand...
I guess 'much of a difference' is subjective. I'd call 75-100% performance gain significant...

With this kind of argument you may as well buy a cheap D-Link NAS that can do 20MB/s for $100. Or a Sheevaplug thingie with some USB hard drives. It'll save more than double again the power consumption of an Atom and 'only' cut performance by another 50%, and it'll save you plenty of money.

For feature's this. is even better. But a little higher priced. Although if you drop the sata card I linked in my original list it would be about the same price & give allot more future expansion as well as the dual GBe nic's..
Click to expand...

Yeah, this is a much better option, or if you can find one, a 945GSE-based board would be even better. Still, with the 945GC you really bite into the power advantage, and you hurt performance even more.
 
keenan said:
I guess 'much of a difference' is subjective. I'd call 75-100% performance gain significant...
Click to expand...

sure.. But 0.01ms is 100% faster then 0.02ms.. Doesn't mean that as humans we can tell the difference..

Thats like saying "yea I can blink twice as fast as you can" it makes no difference in the end the outcome is still the same..

So I Just re-read the thread to see what it was that the OP was wanting to do that everyone thinks this huge system is needed for.. Well there isn't anything.. The biggest concern seems to be the amount of expansion space, But nothing that is going to require a desktop class CPU running 24/7. Whats listed is quite a bit less then what I do with an atom.. I am figuring though on topping out with 4x 1.5tb samsung eco drives & the Op sounds to be going well over that.. That being said the op will want something with more slots be it pci or pcix.. to do it on the cheap either of the following & a couple cheapo sata controllers would do

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813135247
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813153144

Adding either board, a cheap 4 port sata card & 4x 1.5tb samsung eco drives (they just dropped on price to 89.99 each) your under 500 for 6tb of total space. The remaining hundread for memory case & psu (mostly memory)
 
Ive seen much nicer atom boards with PCI express instead (x16 capped to x4). To be buying the previous generation Atom platform would be senseless if you care about power consumption; then a low power AMD setup would consume as much power in idle mode but be alot faster and extensible setup.
 
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