Background: I'm building a quiet HTPC + NAS that is also supposed to be used for general computer usage. I'm so far generally happy with things, it was just that I was expecting a little better IO performance. I have no clue if my expectations are unreal. The NAS is there as a general purpose file storage and as a media server for XBMC and other devices. ZFS is a requirement.
Question: Where is my bottle-neck, and is there anything I can do config wise, to improve my performance? I'm thinking VM-disk settings could be something but I really have no idea where to go since I'm neither experienced with FreeNAS nor VMware-WS.
Tests:
When I'm on the host OS and copy files (from the SSD) to the CIFS share, I get around 30 Mbytes/sec read and write. When I'm on my laptop laptop, wired to the network, I get about the same specs. The test I've done are with a 16 GB ISO, and with about 200 MB of RARs and I've tried avoiding the RAM-cache by reading different files than the ones I'm writing ( 10 GB). It feels like having less CPU cores is a lot more efficient, since the resource manager in Windows reports less CPU-usage. With 4 cores in VMware, CPU usage was 50-80%, with 1 core it was 25-60%.
EDIT:
HD ActiveTime was quite high on SSD so I moved the page file, disabled hibernate and enabled Win DiskCache both on SSD and RAID. This resulted in no real performance difference for one file, but if i transferred 2 files the total speed went up to 50 Mbytes/s vs ~40. The ActiveTime avg also went down a lot (to ~20%) but has now higher bursts. DiskIO is on ~ 30-35 Mbytes/s avgs, with ~100Mb bursts. Network is on 200-250Mbits/s with ~45 active TCP connections.
Hardware
Asus F2A85-M Pro
A10-5700
16GB DDR3 1600
OCZ Vertex 2 128GB SSD
2x Generic 1tb 7200 RPM drives as RAID0 (in win7)
Intel Gigabit Desktop CT
Software
Host OS: Win7 (SSD)
VMware Worksation 9 (SSD)
FreeNAS 8.3 VM (20GB VDisk on SSD)
CPU: I've tried 1, 2 and 4 cores.
Virtualisation engine, Preferred mode: Automatic
10,24Gb ram
50Gb SCSI VDisk on the RAID0, VDisk is formatted as ZFS and exposed through CIFS through FreeNAS.
NIC Bridge, Replicate physical network state
Below are two typical process print-outs while I'm transfering one file to the CIFS share.
last pid: 2707; load averages: 0.60, 0.43, 0.24 up 0+00:07:05 00:34:26
32 processes: 2 running, 30 sleeping
Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 1620M Wired, 2188K Cache, 149M Buf, 8117M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND
2640 root 1 102 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:25 25.98% smbd
1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74808K uwait 0:02 0.00% python
last pid: 2746; load averages: 0.93, 0.60, 0.33 up 0+00:08:53 00:36:14
33 processes: 2 running, 31 sleeping
Mem: 101M Active, 53M Inact, 4722M Wired, 2188K Cache, 152M Buf, 5015M Free
Swap: 4096M Total, 4096M Free
PID USERNAME THR PRI NICE SIZE RES STATE TIME WCPU COMMAND
2640 root 1 76 0 50164K 10364K RUN 0:52 16.99% smbd
1897 root 6 44 0 168M 74816K uwait 0:02 0.00% python
I'm sorry if my question isn't phrased right, I'm really bad at these kind of things, and it is the first time I post here at SU. I also appreciate any other suggestions to something, I could have missed.
