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Crappy NAS performance using Bridge

Lars

Active member
I am today using Adobe Bridge (CS2) to organize some raw files that reside on a Netgear ReadyNAS Duo (stock 256 MB memory) over gigabit ethernet.

Performance is incredibly low when moving files between folders. CPU and network bandwidth load are both very low.

Should I suspect the underpowered CPU in the ReadyNAS, or try adding memory up to 1 GB?

Lars
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
I am no expert on LAN, but I'd definitely suspect the NAS RAM as the primary issue. I assume most of your files are larger drum scans and as such, probably close to or even larger than the installed RAM on the NAS? I would guess that installing enough NAS RAM to accommodate your normal size image plus NAS overhead would speed things up considerably. I suspect even a slower NAS CPU can process at sustained throughput speeds...
 

Lars

Active member
It does take the same memory as my old Sony laptop, I think I'll pull a 1GB module from the Sony.

BTW throughput is not that bad (12-28 MB/sec), it seems that specifically directory operations (move files, sync file system with desktop, etc) are slow. could be memory or CPU.

The box is running some Linux flavor, there must be a way to monitor CPU and memory load. Maybe this is a good time for me to do something about my Linux aversion.
 

Lars

Active member
Well, no dice... the Duo must be picky when it comes to memory, specs were correct but it wouldn't boot.
 
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dlew308

Guest
12-28 MB/sec seems slow for going over NAS. Heavy loads are pretty cpu intensive on the NAS server. I'm going to google ReadyNAS and read up on this.
 

LJL

New member
I have a ReadyNAS device also. Have it hooked up to a gigabit network with my Macs, which is extremely fast for everything else. As a RAID 5 device handling smaller files for reads/writes, it has quite good performance. However, when trying to copy large files, or folders that contain lots of files, its performance drops off quite a bit. I do think this is attributable to the Linux OS they are running in the device, and how it manages large complex multi-files. Not sure that a RAM upgrade is going to help all that much, as the OS and processor seem to be a bottleneck on this device.

LJ
 

Jack

Sr. Administrator
Staff member
FWIW, when I migrated from PC to Mac, I ported all of my image database from my NTFS drives to my Mac OS drives across Gig LAN and maintained transfer speeds at around 60 to 80 MB/s, so I'd agree that 12 - 28 MB/s seems slow.
 

Lars

Active member
Thanks David - yes, I've been following the readynas.com site for a few months.

Like I said, throughput is not that bad. It isn't great. The point is, that's not the bottleneck that I am whining about. When moving files on the NAS utilized bandwith stays below 150 KB/sec, so clearly there is another problem.

LJ,
My Duo model is a low-end model. it mirrors two drives into a RAID 1, that's about it. I assume you have the 4-drive model since you can do RAID 5?

Jack,
Yep, same 70MB/sec experience here, moving files from desktop to laptop. Clearly CPU power is important for good throughput.

Generally it seems that the consumer NAS market is moving towards more powerful CPUs that can cope with Gigabit speeds.
 

LJL

New member
Lars,
Yes, I have a 4 drive model set up as RAID 5. However, there is still a throughput issue with large files and folders of files that does not seem to be a problem with single files. Not sure what the issue is, but there definitely is lower performance.

LJ
 
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dlew308

Guest
Lars: What are you running on your PC/laptop? Does it use the NAS via cifs/nfs?
I haven't dealt much for consumer NAS units, just a buffalo NAS many years ago. I deal with really expensive NAS units at work though :)
 

Lars

Active member
David, I tried CIFS and NFS from my Vista and XP computers. The common denominator was "slow". I don't think it's the protocol or the client OS.

Anyways... The NAS wasn't expensive. As always, you get more or less what you pay for.
 

robsteve

Subscriber
Have you tried moving files without using bridge? Some of the slowdown may be bridge doing work in the background building thumbnails.

Robert
 

Lars

Active member
Rob: Admittedly Bridge (CS2) is not good with networked drives, but it's not only Bridge that is sluggish.
 

Lars

Active member
My computers are running XP, Vista x64, and Windows 2000. Symptoms are the same across platforms.

As I mentioned in my original post, network utilization is close to zero as well as client CPU utilization. My conclusion is that my NAS is simply overwhelmed (it has over a million files in its file system).
 

Jan Brittenson

Senior Subscriber Member
The root problem is that when you move files between folders, for some reason, the ReadyNAS ends up using copy and delete. It doesn't realize the move is within the same volume, or it's erroneously configured not to check.

The reason I asked about Vista is that SP1 fixed a bunch of problems and effectively added SMB 2.0 support.
 
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