NAS network speed issues - help troubleshooting

Linux
#1

Hello Everyone.

I need some help with troubleshooting an issue I am facing in my home network. I have a western digital NAS “WD My Cloud”. It’s based on Debian 8 and has very limited resources ARM CPU dual core and 256 MB RAM. I managed to stop most of the useless services like “twonky” and the performance got somehow better.

The problem I am having is that when I’m copying files from that device the process is extremely slow. The write process from my laptop to the NAS goes with average of 10MB/s:

marin@Hatchery:[/Users/marin/bin] $ rsync -e "ssh -p17170" -aHz --progress  /Users/Marin/VirtualBox\ VMs/Ubuntu-15-10-desktop/ root@192.168.0.105:/nfs/VM/
building file list ...
9 files to consider
./
Ubuntu-15-10-desktop.vbox
        8196 100%    0.00kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=7/9)
Ubuntu-15-10-desktop.vbox-prev
        8195 100%    7.82MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=6/9)
Ubuntu-15-10-desktop.vdi
   **145915904   2%   11.67MB/s    0:07:17**

But copying files from the NAS to my laptop is getting extremely slow:

marin@Hatchery:[/Users/marin/bin] $ rsync -e "ssh -p17170" -aHz --progress root@192.168.0.105:/nfs/VM/Fedora-23  /Users/Marin/VirtualBox\ VMs/
receiving file list ...
4 files to consider
Fedora-23/
Fedora-23/Fedora.vbox
        7932 100%    7.56MB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#1, to-check=2/4)
Fedora-23/Fedora.vbox-prev
        7874 100%   20.84kB/s    0:00:00 (xfer#2, to-check=1/4)
Fedora-23/Fedora.vdi
    **88604171   1%  829.73kB/s    1:32:48**

Does anyone have an idea what could be causing the slowness or tips how to better troubleshoot this?

#2

Whoever manages to help, wins a free beer :slight_smile:

#3

Reasons can be many, for example while copying files it compress, encrypt and count number of files before copying to destination server which leads to high disk I/O writing rate and cause high cpu load.

Alternative way is to get rid of high CPU usage and slowness, you should move from rsync/SSH to rsync/NFS. You could export the locations via NFS and then use rsync locally from the NFS mount to your destination location.

This is what I can suggest you…:slight_smile: where is my beer?

#4

Hahaha, the beer may need to wait a little more (you know to cool off in the fridge) :smile:

Why using the same command:

  • from laptop to NAS -> High Speed
  • from NAS to Laptop -> Slow speed

The Laptop has an SSD while the Nas uses a standard HDD on 7200 RPM

Exporting as NFS or using “afp” (Apple’s protocol) has the same slow results when copying from NAS.

#5

Then I think it’s related to HDD RPM speed issue, as you stated that your laptop as SSD which is faster and modern (of course you will get maximum speed with SSD), where as HDD doesn’t give that much of speed compare to SSD…

#6

Well I think both devices should be able to both read and write with speed higher than 500 KB/s :slight_smile:

#7

Yes it should be, and from the above output I can clearly see that it reached to 7MB per second while copying files from NAS to Lappy…

#8

Yes, it starts good, but after 10 seconds it drops to 500-600KB/s