TrueNAS SMB performance significantly worse than others on same hardware

[winnielinnie]

@HoneyBadger

Eg: time ls -la and time smbclient //server/share -U username -c "ls" ?

smbclient from a Windows client?

[HoneyBadger]

smbclient from TrueNAS locally

[Duratori]

@somethingweird Unfortunately, the all lower case option would not be possible for us due to this warning: “All files on the share must be converted to lowercase when using the example. Files using uppercase or both uppercase and lowercase are no longer listed on the share.”

Just learning how this forum works, and trying to get replies handled optimally. My applogies on the multiple posts which don’t seem to mark the message I am reply to, even though I use the reply button.

[somethingweird]

@Duratori

Unfortunately, the all lower case option would not be possible for us due to this warning: “All files on the share must be converted to lowercase when using the example. Files using uppercase or both uppercase and lowercase are no longer listed on the share.”

Understandable. That why need to read the samba docs - and figure out what tuning can be applied to your case. Sometime samba out of the box configuration isn’t tune to every situation.

[NickF1227]

@Duratori

Unfortunately, the all lower case option would not be possible for us due to this warning: “All files on the share must be converted to lowercase when using the example. Files using uppercase or both uppercase and lowercase are no longer listed on the share

You can work around this issue as long as you dont have any collisions.

If you combine the Samba option with the ZFS property for Case Sensitivity set to Insensitive (this is the default for all datasets created with the SMB Dataset Preset). Just note this setting must be applied at the time of dataset creation.

[Duratori]

@NickF1227

You can work around this issue as long as you dont have any collisions.

If you combine the Samba option with the ZFS property for Case Sensitivity set to Insensitive (this is the default for all datasets created with the SMB Dataset Preset). Just note this setting must be applied at the time of dataset creation.

I just checked and all shares were created with the SMB preset, so these settings are already inplace. Thanks for the info.

[winnielinnie]

Any results from this post?

[neofusion]

Your first post is missing vital information.
Only now, 25 posts in, do you mention the SMB preset used (thank you!) and only 40 minutes ago did you say what the clients were.

We still don’t know how the dataset being shared has been set up and even though you say it doesn’t matter, posting the hardware used would be good for context.

You have a lot more information available to you yet you’re asking the community for help. Maximise your chances of getting help by sharing everything. Worth a thought perhaps?

[Duratori]

We’ve determined that this test is literally the worst possible scenario for TrueNAS against Windows native smb. We somehow stumbled upon the one edge case where the discrepancy is this large, a single client system doing multiple concurrent directory enumerations. Looks like we will need to solve this on the client side and not via TrueNAS or samba.

[winnielinnie]

Ok.

[Duratori]

@neofusion

Your first post is missing vital information.
Only now, 25 posts in, do you mention the SMB preset used (thank you!) and only 40 minutes ago did you say what the clients were.

We still don’t know how the dataset being shared has been set up and even though you say it doesn’t matter, posting the hardware used would be good for context.

You have a lot more information available to you yet you’re asking the community for help. Maximise your chances of getting help by sharing everything. Worth a thought perhaps?

In my defense, I did state we are new to TrueNAS so I do not know all the relevant information to post. The dataset presets was not something I thought to include as I did not know their impact. As for the clients used, we lucked out in that Windows appers to be one of the fastest SMB clients. Again, not something I thought to include but answered when asked.

I do apreciate all the feedback, but this looks to be a very edge case not worth pursing further in this forum. Recoding the legacy systems we have that are hitting this bottleneck looks to be a better option.

[neofusion]

Okay.
For some more context, TrueNAS can be performant with directories containing zounds of files:

SMB Directory List Times

[HoneyBadger]

@Duratori

We somehow stumbled upon the one edge case where the discrepancy is this large, a single client system doing multiple concurrent directory enumerations.

Purely a shot in the dark but I imagine this is a combination of the perfect storm of bad things. With a single-threaded smbd per client connection, your client system doing the concurrent directory enumerations makes it overload the server-side.

I’m still interested to see what happens if you take the physical network out of the equation with the smbclient loopback behavior.

@Duratori

I do apreciate all the feedback, but this looks to be a very edge case not worth pursing further in this forum. Recoding the legacy systems we have that are hitting this bottleneck looks to be a better option.

It is an oddity but it might be something still worth looking into, if you’re willing to experiment further.

[Duratori]

@HoneyBadger

I’m still interested to see what happens if you take the physical network out of the equation with the smbclient loopback behavior.

I’ll try to do this today and share the numbers. Not giving up, just accepting the fact that this might be so niche a senario that it would not be worth anyone’s time to try to resolve on the TrueNAS side, if even possible.