Yosemite and SMB performance - Your input for benchmarking!

[rwillett]

Hi,

I've just upgraded my iMac to Yosemite. The iMac is the least most important Mac in the house and acts as a test rig, if it all goes pear shaped, nothing lost, so we upgrade the iMac first to check things out and see if Apple has gone mad anywhere.

So we upgraded to Yosemite, zero problems. Can't say I like the new colour scheme or the flat 2D icons, but no doubt once the LSD has worn off they'll be fine

I took a copy of my Install Yosemite image as I have three more Mac laptops and a Hackintosh to upgrade at some time in the future and downloading another 20GB is a bit of arse-ache.

I copied the install image to my NAS box for safe keeping and was surprised by the speed of the transfer. It moved the 5GB in around 70 secs or so. My normal performance on my NAS is abysmal for SMB I/II or AFP when using the Mac. Using a Linux box and NFS mounts is acceptable, but I have more or less given up on using the NAS for anything that is needed quickly when using the Mac.

The NAS is a Synology DS213+ with a two disk expansion box on. Its fully patched with the latest DSM software. I spent a long time trying to tune the Mac and the NAS for decent performance but came to the conclusion the Mac clients for SMB and AFP were ****e. NFS on a Mac is a joke, even with various paid for 3rd party add-ons I brought.

Anyway, simple file copying was very quick, since its so long since I used the NAS for anything like this I have forgotten what it was like.

So my intention is to benchmark my NAS with Mavericks on Macs, Yosemite on Mac, Maverick on Hackintosh and Yosemite on Hackintosh and see if it really has improved or I'm just remembering it falsely.

Since I'm going to do this in a more or less organised way (at least for me), I thought it would be useful for other people if they had the results. Whilst my contribution to the Tonymac forum is limited as my technical expertise lies in other areas, I'm more than happy to share the results here so it might help other people make informed decisions.

So the questions I have are:

1. What would you like to see benchmarked to make it useful for you. Simple file copies using the Finder? Large files, small files.

2. What software would you suggest using to help benchmarking. I'm familiar with Blackmagic and a German company whose name escapes me but who used to make Postscript software in the 90's (yes I am that old).

3. Suggestions on how to make sure the benchmarking is valid. e.g. clearing out buffer caches etc etc.

I'm happy to put a couple of hours aside to do this and report back the results. If there's no interest I'll do it for my own peace of mind.

I'm not keen to try and tune the performance at this stage. I want to test OOTB performance rather than hacking Jumbo frames together or unrealistic use-cases.

Your thoughts welcomed. For once not a plea for help

All the best,

Rob.

 

[jacobh]

I would like to see speed tests for large files (ranging from 1GB to 10GB) transferred using SMB1, SMB2, and SMB3 in Yosemite. I could see from some other posts on other forums that some think that Yosemite will default to SMB3, and connecting to my university Windows file server has been incredibly unproductive for me since Mavericks (and to a more limited extent prior to that). I am REALLY hoping that Yosemite brings a drastic improvement in SMB communication with Windows file servers. Even working on smaller files from the server can be quite tedious and take forever for programs like Pages and MS Word to do even incremental saves for files less than 10MB. Here is brief description of my working environment:

I typically VPN into my university server from home, where I have a fiber-optic connection (100mbps up/down), but the connection is sufficiently slow and unstable that even working on small files from the server presents regular problems. It also takes a very long time to transfer large files (I would be happy to provide some comparative benchmarks).

Connecting to the server when hard-wired in to the local network where the server is located provides a small increase in speed, but not much. Even loading the contents of a directory can often take as long as two minutes, which just seems absurd. I have looked into this extensively with my IT dept., and we have concluded that it is simply the SMB implementation in Mavericks that is the root problem. Hopefully Yosemite brings something better. Either way, I look forward to your benchmarks.

 

[rwillett]

Jacob,

Your comments are interesting. My anecdotal evidence so far on Mavericks is that SMB performance is pretty poor at least until 10.9.5. Mt interest in this was due to trying to use a backup system to write backups to my NAS. I'm not going to name the company as I act as a BETA tester for them and I am 99.99% convinced the issues I faced with slow speed were due to the underlying network performance of Mavericks.

I simply could not get any decent speed out of the connection to the NAS through SMB and abandoned using the NAS as a backup server (don't get me started on Time Machine )

However a Linux box I use for the data capture software has very good performance to the NAS using NFS. Also FTP access to the NAS is excellent so I know I have decent network bandwidth and disk access, its just when I use SMB that the performance drops through the floor. From tests I did last year I got between 20-30MB/sec doing Finder copies between my NAS and my Mac. I cjust opied a copy of OS X Yosemite which is around 5.3GB in around 85 secs just now (wholly unscientific) which works out at 66MB/sec, so something has improved, but no idea what, hence the benchmarks. It'll take a few days to set things up and see how it goes.

Rob

 

[jacobh]

Looking forward to seeing the results! I am waiting to update to Yosemite until my IT dept. gives us the go-ahead, as they are testing compatibility with several of our systems on the campus network. Anyway, I look forward to seeing what your benchmark tests turn up.

 

[mattynl]

No problems here but it took quite some time before I had everything setup up.

I use FreeBSD with ZFS on my NAS with Samba4. With Yosiemite you need to use SMB3 (which Samab4 supports).

Peaks around 122mb/s avg around 90mb/s

I also set this system controle in OSX: net.inet.tcp.delayed_ack=0