Bottleneck ? help me to find it ( pic inside )

[honny]

Hi,

i have just assembled a new fileserver machine .

im using 4 x 2TB samsung drive in RAID 5.

the operating system is a minimal netinstall of debian 6.0 amd64 installed on a 4Gb usb drive .

the raid drives are a single partition in etx4 mounted under /home

im testing it using a 4,5 Gb file.

the client machine is a simple windows with RAID 0 drives on it .

as shown in the picture :



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copying the FROM client TO server i obtain around 95% network usage .

if i copy intead FROM server TO client the network usage drop to 65% .

so there is bottleneck somewhere ?

or is it the normal behaviour ?

if it is normal , why it happen ?

my hardware setup should be enough to fulfill the bandwith right ?

why it doesnt happen copying the data back from the server to the client ?


thx in advance for help



NOTE :
-same situtaion happen also using the raid 5 cloud for both operating systema and area storage .
-the network link is 1Gbs ethernet ( only a 1Gbs switch betweeen the 2 systems )

 

[00Roush]

Is your client machine running Windows XP? If it is I would have to guess that your bottleneck is the file copy engine that is part of Windows XP. I can explain why in more detail if you would like but basically it was not designed for high speed file copies over networks.

Another time I have seen performance like that is when using a network card that is connected via the PCI bus.

To narrow down where the bottleneck is you could test your network using Iperf. If you would like to see if your file copy engine is your bottleneck you could test with a program I created. It basically is a proof of concept to get high speed file copies on XP that are comparable to speeds seen on Vista SP1/7.

This might help too.

00Roush

 

[Phatty2x4]

I had the same type of issue - I could copy from my XP box at a consistent speed. Copy to the xp box was a "luck of the draw" speed event.

Try the following (it helped me):

Go to properties on MyComputer
Select advanced Tab
Under performance, hit the setting button
when performance option screen opens, select advanced tab
under processor scheduling, select background services
under memory usage, select system cache

Hit the ok button until windows alerts you that it need to reboot.

Reboot

Enjoy consistent speed