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File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow
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  1. #1
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    File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    I've got a new QNAP TS-251+ NAS drive. Fedora detected it with no problem and everything works, I can copy files to and from it using the Gnome "Files" file manager. However, the copies are very, very slow. It looks like the top speed is around 1.2MB/sec. From my wife's Windows box, we're seeing speeds more like 60-70MB/sec.

    Is this a known problem with Fedora's Samba support or can anyone recommend a method to speed up access to the NAS or further diagnose the problem?

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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    Run tcpdump and see what is going on.
    --
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  3. #3
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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    Apparently there's an option in the settings to allow NFS, I'd try mounting over NFS instead of Samba as it's more "unixy". Also play around with disabling the write cache and other performance settings on the NAS to see if any of then adversely effect performance.

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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    After more googling, I finally found out why it's so slow. Apparently it's the fault of something called gvfsd-smb, some internal component of Gnome that sits between the file manager and the network layer. There are numerous bugs filed against it on all the major distros for making copy to and from Samba networks an order of magnitude slower than they should be. One of the bugs indicated the problem might have something to do with small buffer sizes hard-coded into the gvfsd-smb program. So it looks like there's nothing I can do for now but hope for bug fixes in a future Fedora version.

    Thanks for the suggestion on using NFS but I'm not looking for a "more unixy" way to copy files, just want the normal way to be faster. I'll check the NAS settings but as I said, access is fast on the Windows box, so I think it's probably set correctly already.

    ---------- Post added at 09:13 AM ---------- Previous post was at 09:09 AM ----------

    Here are a few of the bug reports that seem related:

    https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=985823

    https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...s/+bug/1236619

    https://askubuntu.com/questions/1944...mb-performance

    https://mail.gnome.org/archives/gvfs.../msg00002.html

  5. #5
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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    Why are you poking around in the dark?

    To measure is to know.

    Ferinstance:
    # tcpdump -nlX -i eth0 host servername and port 445

    After a few minutes of just sitting and staring at the screen, you'll realize why it is slow and then you can fix it. It isn't rocket surgery.
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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    Quote Originally Posted by steevithak
    Thanks for the suggestion on using NFS but I'm not looking for a "more unixy" way to copy files, just want the normal way to be faster. I'll check the NAS settings but as I said, access is fast on the Windows box, so I think it's probably set correctly already.
    Well that depends on your definition of "normal". "Samba is the standard Windows interoperability suite of programs for Linux and Unix", i.e: it's meant to allow copying between Windows and *nix. Considering you're copying from Linux to Linux I'd consider using NFS more normal than using samba.

  7. #7
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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    I found by far the fastest solution. The NAS drive has a USB 3.0 port on the front of it. So I can copy files from my Fedora box to an external drive via USB, then move the drive to the NAS box and copy them onto it. That method gets me copy speeds of 100MB/sec+ (not counting the extra second or two to move the cable over). But it's 100x faster than Fedora can move the files directly over ethernet to the box. Fortunately, this is mostly a one-time thing to get large numbers of files onto the NAS. I'll only need to access the files occasionally from my Fedora box so Fedora's super-slow SAMBA speeds won't be a big hardship.

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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    Surely ticking the "enable NFS" check box in the NAS web menus and mounting the drive with a "mount user@192.168.N.N:/path /mnt/path" command is easier than copying files via a external USB drive?

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    Re: File copy to/from NAS drive VERY slow

    Quote Originally Posted by HaydnH
    Surely ticking the "enable NFS" check box in the NAS web menus and mounting the drive with a "mount user@192.168.N.N:/path /mnt/path" command is easier than copying files via a external USB drive?
    Sorry, probably my fault for not providing more details - the NAS is on a home network and also accessed by my wife's Windows box, so I want to keep the configuration as simple as possible for working easily with all kinds of computers and it seems Windows, the QNAP NAS, and the Fedora "Files" File Manager all default to using SAMBA for discovering and accessing network storage devices, so that seemed like the way to go. Also, my preference is to stick with what's possible using the Fedora GUI and not have to start doing a lot of command line stuff. That's the same reasons I didn't follow up with the other suggestion that I start debugging the Fedora networking code using a TCP/IP dump program - I'm not interested in coding up a patch for the bug right now, I just wanted to find a quick solution to get my files loaded. Also, I haven't used NFS in many years and remember next to nothing about it, so didn't want to spend a lot of time figuring out how to get Fedora to discover and mount an NFS drive.

    Once I get caught up with other things on my ToDo list, maybe I'll revisit this and take a look at doing proper diagnostics and see if I help contribute towards a bug fix for the underlying problem in the gvfsd-smb code.

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