WL-HDD performance tweaking

[rumagent]

Hi

Can someone give me some pointers on how to improve the transfer performance of the wl-hdd? The rates I am getting now are less than a mb per second.

I have installed oleg's firmware.

[Ade]

I'm guessing you're talking about the performance of Samba.

If so, try adding

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY

to your global section of the smb.conf file and restart samba.

How are you measuring the performance? I think I get about 1.5Mb/sec writing to my WL-HDD using the windows task manager.

[rumagent]

I'm guessing you're talking about the performance of Samba.

If so, try adding

socket options = TCP_NODELAY IPTOS_LOWDELAY

to your global section of the smb.conf file and restart samba.

How are you measuring the performance? I think I get about 1.5Mb/sec writing to my WL-HDD using the windows task manager.

Hi

Well, I am also talking about samba. It is also slow if ftp or scp is used. I have tried the socket options you described, but still no luck. Samba transfer speed is capped at ~840kb/s.

I measure the speed by sending a 100 mb file and time (e.g. time scp testdata 192.168.1.220: ).

I am somewhat envious of your transfer speed. Can I get you to do a "nvram show" and post it?

I like the wl-hdd, but it seems to be borne slow. 1.5 mb/s is much better than mine, but considering that it is sold as a 54mbit device it is somewhat disappointing:(

[Ade]

I was going to post my nvram contents but they are rather large and they do contain stuff like WPA passphrase, and I'm not sure how much use it will be.

I thought that the main culprit of slow speed was the hard drive.
I'm currently using a 40 Gb Samsung MP0402H SpinPoint M40, 2.5" ATA-6, 5400 rpm, 8MB Cache, 12 ms.

Have you tried measuring speed to a fast flash stick?

[rumagent]

I do not think it is the drive, as it is considerably faster than the speeds I am experiencing (as well as any usb1.1 device). I tested it with hdparm and got the following results (they are slightly slower than optimal, as I were downloading a rather large file at the time):

hdparm -tT /dev/discs/disc0/disc

Timing cached reads: 88 MB in 2.01 seconds = 43.78 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 16 MB in 3.14 seconds = 5.10 MB/sec

The drive is a 80gb Seagate Momentus.

I must admit I am at my wits end. Which incidentally was why I asked for the nvram printout - I pretty much hope that there is some ridiculous setting I have overlooked (preferably on the form: fast = false; :D )

[Ade]

My figures for hdparm -Tt are :-

Timing cached reads: 108 MB in 2.06 seconds = 52.43 MB/sec
Timing buffered disk reads: 26 MB in 3.09 seconds = 8.41 MB/sec

but like you say, these are way faster than you need.

Have you tried connecting by a ethernet cable to see if it's just your wireless link that is slow?

Do you use a swap partition?

[Winne2Koslowski]

Hi!

I too was annoyed by the slow transfer speeds when using smb-shares.

I now use nfs-exports and rsync.


iTunes/iTunes Music/Autechre/Tri Repetae/1-03 Leterel.mp3
10331453 100% 12.13MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#7, to-check=3938/7161)
iTunes/iTunes Music/Autechre/Tri Repetae/1-04 Rotar.mp3
11676099 100% 11.86MB/s 0:00:00 (xfer#8, to-check=3937/7161)
iTunes/iTunes Music/Autechre/Tri Repetae/1-05 Stud.mp3
13981656 100% 3.36MB/s 0:00:03 (xfer#9, to-check=3936/7161)

But i can’t believe these numbers. Nor the stats from my networkconnections-utility. Anyway, it seems to be much faster than rsync over ssh (dropbear eats cpu) or smb (smb of course eats cpu too).

There is an ipgk-package for rsync which without further configuration starts the deamon.

nfs-exports can be added vie the Asus-web-interface.

[Winne2Koslowski]

Ok, the above post was written when using the LAN Port, when i rsync to a nfs export via WLAN it is really fast! Transfer speed with rsync or normal file copy is between four and eight Megabytes per second. Transfering a 1GB avi takes 15 minutes. And there is no guessing in these numbers.

When i play music on th WL-HDD the 1GB file transfer takes twice the time but the sound is not garbled. But this is only via WLAN. When i did file transfers via the LAN port the sound always got garbled.

Odd, isn’t it?

[rumagent]

How do you measure speed? 1 gb in fifteen minutes is approximately 1.1 mb/sec, which is pretty standard on the wl-hdd.

[Winne2Koslowski]

Sorry for writing so much BS, of course my WL-harddisk gives between one and two MB pes second.

For some reason the NFS share wasn’t mountet correctly and the Mac wrote to a folder on it’s own harddrive.

So nfs does not seem to be faster than smb or ftp, but it uses less CPU.

[Winne2Koslowski]

Couldn’t you gain some perfomance via hdparm like this guy on his Terastation?

http://www.enosnusnu.de/index.php?/archives/32-Mehr-Bumms-auf-der-TS.html