Low throughout: Qnap 259Pro / Airport Extreme / 802.11ac

[vikingboy]

Been trying to diagnose low copy speeds when moving files from my Macbook pro to my Qnap TS259 Pro NAS and could do with some ideas what to try next to get to the bottom of them.

So hardware is:

Qnap 259 Pro, 2 * 4TB WD RED disk drives in RAID 1 (mirrored)
Cat 6e cable -> Airport Extreme 802.11ac router (with 2TB time machine disk)
Late 2013 Macbook pro 15", 16GB, i7, 750 gfx

Qnap & Airport run latest firmwares.

My airport extreme is 8ft (just over 2metres) away from where my desk is with nothing between them. My signal strength as reported in the menu bar is showing as 1170, it has been known to show 1300 and sometimes drops to 970ish, don't think Ive ever seen it below that.
Wifi signal strength as reported by Wifi Explorer is generally excellent (85%+), I'm the only user of 5Ghz in the area and even the 2.4Ghz channels aren't that contested.

Copying creative assets (movies, videos and audio tracks) to or from my MBP to my Qnap was seeing maximum 11MB/s.

Ive tried using AFP, NFS and Samba.

via a 802.11ac connection
SMB provides 15MB/s read and 15MB/s write.
AFP provides 48MB/s read 15MB/s write.

using cat5 to connect my macbook (via thunderbolt adapter) to Airport I see
SMB 65MB/s read, 52MB/s write
AFP 110MB/s read, 70 MB/s write

I'm assuming because the cat 5 cabled connection to my Qnap provides 110/70MB/s that the Qnap device itself is correctly configured.

This leaves the wifi connection as the potential cause of the issue.
Given the short range, lack of obstructions and lack of tuning possible in the Airport software, I'm not sure what to try next.

I tried the wifes 7 year old Thinkpad laptop (T400) with a old network card and even that saw 20MB/s read/write which I think is limited by its old 2.5" hard disk.

I checked the following and didn't see any dubious errors either....

QNAP reports eth0 link as
1500 packet size, 1Gigabit, full duplex, no trunking.
Memory 20% utilised, CPU averages around 30% but peaks to 100% a number of times during a copy operation - its not pegged at 100% so loads of available headroom still.

# hdparm –tT /dev/sd[abcdefgh]
suggests 110MB-ish speeds are possible form the hard disks
no bad blocks present

# ethtool eth0
1000Mb/s connection & full duplex

# ifconfig
eth0 shows close to zero dropped packets (2000 from a possible 200000000 or some other massive number)

I'm wondering if I should try and get a new airport to see if thats fixes things? Im loathed to move to a different brand because Ive found reliability excellent over the years of using airports and have a airport express hanging off extending another region of the house - although his perf does indeed suck!

any ideas gratefully received, thanks in adv

Ian

here's images of wifi and cable connections run through LAN test

wired

wifi

 

[sfx2000]

I assume you're running Mavericks (10.9) - there was a couple of patches that came out, along with the update to 10.9.2.

Your numbers are a bit low - one thing to try...

Go to Preferences/Network/Wifi - delete all profiles - reboot, and then add the wifi network back in. Many times, believe it or not, this fixes things...

11ac AirPort Extreme (AExAC) and TimeCapsule right now are at v7.7.3, so check airport utliity

It's not a network/router issue - it's a client side issue, AFP is most impacted, but I would suspect that CIFS and NFS might be as well...

sfx

 

[vikingboy]

Thanks for your information.

I can confirm I'm running 10.9.2 Mavericks and the AE is on 7.7.3

Ill delete the profiles, reboot and see if that helps.....appreciate the suggestion.

 

[vikingboy]

not much improvement but a small amount.....

Create 300 files: 12.4s
Open/close 300: 2s
Remove 300 files: 6.7s
Write 30MB: 11.4MB/s
Read 30MB: 15.8MB/s
Lock unlock 16000 files: 54.1s
Read directory (640 files) 131.8ms

 

[vikingboy]

came back to this today and found read speeds are now circa 50MB/s which is great but write speeds are still low at around 10-15MB/s

Some improvement but not the jump I was hoping for.

 

[sfx2000]

came back to this today and found read speeds are now circa 50MB/s which is great but write speeds are still low at around 10-15MB/s

Some improvement but not the jump I was hoping for.

Is it only the NAS (QNAP Pro) or are you seeing slow write/send performance in general from your MBP over 11ac?

Have you tried mounting the share via CIFS vs. SMB?

How about FTP?

 

[vikingboy]

At the moment yes, low write perf on NAS only so far. The only other thing that could be connected to the wifi spot to verify this low performance is another laptop which I'll need to borrow from the wife and cable up to see if the perf is poor to that also.

Ive tried FTP via Filezilla and CIFS (this is new name for samba correct?) and seen similar poor performance.

As of today, 24/48 hours after I tried your original suggestion, Im still seeing the 50MB read speeds but the still low 10-15MB/s write speeds. Its an improvement for sure.

 

[sfx2000]

At the moment yes, low write perf on NAS only so far. The only other thing that could be connected to the wifi spot to verify this low performance is another laptop which I'll need to borrow from the wife and cable up to see if the perf is poor to that also.

Ive tried FTP via Filezilla and CIFS (this is new name for samba correct?) and seen similar poor performance.

As of today, 24/48 hours after I tried your original suggestion, Im still seeing the 50MB read speeds but the still low 10-15MB/s write speeds. Its an improvement for sure.

Hmm.. one thing I might suggest to try - on the QNAP, try disabling Jumbo Frames in the advanced network settings and see what happens.

Counter-intuitive, but worth a try.

 

[vikingboy]

I checked and jumbo frames aren't enabled.

I checked access time to the built in hard disk in the Airport Extreme (its a 2tb time port model)

Numbers in brackets are the times from the Qnap tests above.

Create 300 files: 10.1s (12.4s)
Open/close 300: 2.7s (2s)
Remove 300 files: 1.8s (6.7s)
Write 30MB: 12.9MB/s (11.4MB/s)
Read 30MB: 14.6MB/s (15.8MB/s)
Lock unlock 16000 files: 40.7s (54.1s)
Read directory (640 files) 161.3ms (131.8ms)

I assume the internal connection is USB2 which may cap some perf too?

thanks for your support,
Ian

 

[sfx2000]

Ian - I'm not really sure what's going on there... it's odd - but I don't think it's the AirPort TimeCapsule (btw, the internal drive on the TimeCapsule is SATA, so that's not a bandwidth concern).

I don't have a QNAP network attached storage device to test against, but I'm running the Airport 802.11ac based TimeCapsule as my primary router, and a wired backhaul to an AirPort Extreme 802.11ac to light up the other side of the house.

My "NAS" is a MacMini 2010 running 10.8.5 Server - over WiFi I'm getting pretty consistent 30 meg reads and writes over wifi on both my MacBookPro 2012 (not retina) which is a 5Ghz 802.11n three stream connection (N450) and my travel laptop, which is the new MacBook Air 2014 edition - and both are fairly consistent at it over wifi - so I'm a bit puzzled as to your low write performance. What's interesting is even over GiGe, your performance is lower than expected I would say - I'm seeing 90 down, 70 up on the internal GiGe NIC on the MacBookPro (built in, don't need thunderbolt, but the Thunderbolt GiGe NIC is known to be a good one).

Apple's had some performance issues with their 802.11ac drivers in both Mountain Lion (10.8) and Mavericks (10.9) - mostly related to AFP file copies... the rMBP is their first three stream AC1300 implementation - perhaps they're being conservative with writing to networked mounts...

BTW - what is the tool you are using to benchmark the remote reads/writes?

sfx

 

[vikingboy]

Once again, thanks for taking the time to confirm your speeds. I haven't got a clue whats going on either, I need to do some troubleshooting starting methodically at the beginning so I'll start on that.
I suspect I'll fire up another server and try a different wifi access point to see if that changes anything or at least narrow down where the bottleneck may be creeping in.

I'll report back when Ive had time to verify.

In terms of software used for benching the disks, I used a combination of good old Black Magic and Helios LAN test

Mac
https://itunes.apple.com/gb/app/blackmagic-disk-speed-test/id425264550?mt=12

PC
Available in the video recorder package from here...
http://www.blackmagicdesign.com/uk/support

and Helios from here....
http://www.helios.de/web/EN/products/LanTest.html

thanks again,
Ian