Performance

I replaced my aging UniFi Security Gateway Pro and slow Circle Home Plus with a Firewalla Gold Plus, giving me gigabit speed firewall and parental controls in a single easy to use and actively developed device. Why Firewalla? We have 1Gbps internet, and I want a feature rich firewall that can operate at line speed. We do configure Apple, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, Disney, etc. (homogeneous control remains lacking) child account restrictions, but I also want content control and visibility for any network connected devices. Firewalla is at the intersection of high speed and visibility and parental controls. ...

This is yet another post on Unraid’s poor SMB performance, but I think I narrowed down the cause of the problem to the Unraid FUSE filesystem. I discovered this about 2 months ago, but with COVID-19 and no kids weekend sporting event duties, I have some time to post. In this round of testing I compared the performance of “User” shares vs. “Disk” shares. An Unraid “User” share is a volume backed by Unraid’s FUSE filesystem, while a “Disk” share is a volume directly backed by the disk’s native filesystem. ...

In my last test I compared Unraid SMB performance with an Ubuntu VM running on Unraid, and Ubuntu outperformed Unraid. I was wondering if the VM disk image synthetically improved performance, maybe IO caching, so this time I tested Ubuntu on the same hardware that runs Unraid. I configured the system to boot from either the Unraid USB stick, or an Ubuntu Server USB stick. In both cases the hardware was exactly the same, and the SMB share was on the same 4 x 1TB Samsung 860 Pro SSD BTRFS volume. I mounted the BTRFS volume using the same mount options that Unraid uses. The Ubuntu Samba server used default options, the only change I made was to register the share. ...

In my last round of testing I found that Unraid v6.8 SMB still underperforms compared to Windows Server 2019, but I was wondering if it is a Linux Samba problem, or an Unraid problem. I installed an Ubuntu Server 18.04.3 LTS VM on Unraid, bridged network, 16GB RAM, 128GB raw disk located on the BTRFS cache volume, consisting of 4 x Samsung Pro 860 SSD drives. This is exactly the same configuration I use for the W2K19 test VM. I installed Samba on Ubuntu using default options. ...

I previously wrote about the poor SMB performance I experienced in Unraid v6.7.2. Unraid v6.8 supposedly addressed SMB performance issues for concurrent read and write operations, and after waiting for the first bugfix release of v6.8, I re-tested using v6.8.1. In my last test I used a combination of batch files and copy and paste, this time I wrote a tool to make repeat testing easy. I am not going to describe the usage here, see the instructions at the GitHub repository. There are new reports in v6.8 of poor SMB performance when a folder contains large numbers of files, so I added a test to try and simulate that behavior, by creating a large number of files, then reading each file, then deleting each file. ...

In my last two posts I described how I migrated from W2K16 and hardware RAID6 to Unraid. Now that I’ve had two Unraid servers in production for a while, I’ll describe some of the good and not so good I experienced. Running Docker on Unraid is magnitudes easier compared to getting Docker to work on Windows. Docker allowed me to move all but one of my workloads from VM’s to containers, simplifying updates, reducing the memory footprint, and improving performance. ...

In my last post I compared the performance of Synology DS1511+ against the QNAP TS-859 Pro. As I finished writing that post, Synology announced the new Synology DS2411+. Instead of using a DS1511+ and DX510 extender for 10 disks, the DS2411+ offers 12 disks in a single device. The price difference is also marginal, DS1511+ is $836, the DX510 is $500, and the DS2411+ is $1700. That is a difference of only $364, and well worth it for the extra storage space, and the reliability and stability of all drives in one enclosure. I ended up returning my DX510 and DS1511+, and got a DS2411+ instead. ...

I have been very happy with my QNAP TS-859 Pro (Amazon), but I’ve run out of space while archiving my media collection, and I needed to expand the storage capacity. You can read about my experience with the TS-859 Pro here, and my experience archiving my media collection here. My primary objective with this project is storage capacity expansion, and my secondary objective is improved performance. My choices for storage capacity expansion included: ...