Network Speed

[joeypesci]

Anyone know of some decent and free or not free network monitor software? To look at speeds etc? I'm trying to find out what is causing the slow copy speeds on my home network. Everything is gigabit. The cables, the nics, the nics in the NAS drives. Currently moving about 75GB to the Netgear Readynas Duo from Windows 7. The speed started off at about 20MB/second and has gradually dropped to 10.7mb as I type. Need to find out what is causing the slow downs. Is it due to work I'm doing on the PC I'm moving files from? Is it because I'm stream a video from the Internet?

Moving/copying speeds has never been that great on my home network it seems.

[hexophrenic]

dumeter (is not free but may have a trial) and bwmeter are 2 I have used in the past for monitoring bandwidth. Have you used wireshark or the like to see what your re-transmissions look like?

[buffy]

Here is a link to the MS tool for that job

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/hardware/gg463264

Edited March 17, 2011 by buffy

[Infiltrator]

What raid configuration are you using at the moment?

Raid 1, 5 or 6

Furthermore, Smallnetbuilder has an excellent article on how to measure/benchmark your NAS/network performance.

http://www.smallnetbuilder.com/nas/nas-howto/31249-how-we-test-networked-storage-devices-revision-4

This should help you out.

Edited March 18, 2011 by Infiltrator

[digip]

Check if "remote differential compression" is on, and then try disabling it and doing it again, check the difference. Since windows Vista its been a new feature and even 7 seems to copy slower over the network because of this. Funny how it doesn't effect http downloads though, but definitely causes slowness. I could copy 100GB's in half or less the time using XP than it takes in Vista and 7. The other problem though, is that Vista and 7 do a lot of verification during a copy process as where XP allowed write though caching and sped up the process, but also could corrupt the data in the long run. Especially with power outages, but if you have everything on a battery backup, shouldn't be an issue.

[joeypesci]

Haven't tried wireshark as thought wireshark would be more to monitor specific traffic over the network to see what data is going across if someone else is using it. But this is just me. I have my PC, a spare PC and another HP PC that runs ESXi with VMs in it. The VMs are a DC and Replication DC, a File Server for profiles (hardly used), 2 netgear 1Gig 8 port switches, Readynas Duo in no RAID they are just seen as JBODs the drives in them and also a Synology Diskstation with 4 drives in also in JBOD setup.

I'll give the suggestions a try. Thanks.

Edited March 18, 2011 by joeypesci

[BattZ]

I have the same problems with my network, same 10-17 speeds, though your network is bigger and better. I tried turning my Remote Differential Compression, but it seemed to have the same speed as before, so your luck may vary on it.

But I also found

http://www.petri.co.il/tweaking_window_vista_performance.htm

which might help people who didn't know how to turn Remote Differential Compression off

[digip]

Some times though, throughput is also controlled by the DISKS I/O and hardware limitations. For example in my experience, when backing up my files, when copying things that have few large files, it goes quickly. When copying and it has many small files, it takes longer, even when only from partition to partition and not over the network. Then there is the actual DISK I/O itself. Depending on the drives RPM speed, default formatted block level(some drives like the Advanced Format drives will actually perform slower if using the default block size and not a specified size meant for the drive itself), write caching, network hardware, router hardware, Cat-5 vs Cat-6, etc, this all plays into the roles of overall speeds.

From reviews though, it seems this device you own is on the slow side, maxing out at around 17MB/s.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122029&cm_re=Netgear_Readynas_Duo-_-22-122-029-_-Product

Go into your NIC settings on the machien sending, and turn off auto negotiation, and set it to 1000GB Full Duplex, see if that changes anything. Even 100MB Full Duplex, and see if that helps. If not, then the device (either the router or the NAS) is setting itself up for the speed it can meet or communicate at.

Even with Gigibit ethernet, I think you will never see real world speeds that can sustain that much bandwidth over a network. 10/100 nics don't even copy at 100mb, and max between 30-50 or so one way.

[Infiltrator]

Some times though, throughput is also controlled by the DISKS I/O and hardware limitations. For example in my experience, when backing up my files, when copying things that have few large files, it goes quickly. When copying and it has many small files, it takes longer, even when only from partition to partition and not over the network. Then there is the actual DISK I/O itself. Depending on the drives RPM speed, default formatted block level(some drives like the Advanced Format drives will actually perform slower if using the default block size and not a specified size meant for the drive itself), write caching, network hardware, router hardware, Cat-5 vs Cat-6, etc, this all plays into the roles of overall speeds.

From reviews though, it seems this device you own is on the slow side, maxing out at around 17MB/s.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16822122029&cm_re=Netgear_Readynas_Duo-_-22-122-029-_-Product

Go into your NIC settings on the machien sending, and turn off auto negotiation, and set it to 1000GB Full Duplex, see if that changes anything. Even 100MB Full Duplex, and see if that helps. If not, then the device (either the router or the NAS) is setting itself up for the speed it can meet or communicate at.

Even with Gigibit ethernet, I think you will never see real world speeds that can sustain that much bandwidth over a network. 10/100 nics don't even copy at 100mb, and max between 30-50 or so one way.

I would say the bottleneck in your network are the hard drives. Hard drives will play a major role when transferring large files over the network. If your hard drives have very low RPM the I/O will not be very effective.

[digip]

I would say the bottleneck in your network are the hard drives. Hard drives will play a major role when transferring large files over the network. If your hard drives have very low RPM the I/O will not be very effective.

I agree with you on the bottleneck, but in his case, I think its the NAS itself, as everyone who has reviewed it has complained about its slowness. You can google for the device and read any number of reviews that all seem to say the same thing, its slow to copy anything to it.

[Infiltrator]

I agree with you on the bottleneck, but in his case, I think its the NAS itself, as everyone who has reviewed it has complained about its slowness. You can google for the device and read any number of reviews that all seem to say the same thing, its slow to copy anything to it.

Just finished reading some of the reviews on the Netgear Readynas Duo and I just don't to understand how Pcauthority, Cnet and PcWorld can rate this product so highly, when frankly every end user are complaining about the slow speeds performance. I personally like Qnap NASes, they are expensive but they do perform a lot better than most brands if not.