TrueNAS VM - Flapping SMB transfer speed between 1Gbit/s and zero

@eXtro181 May be interesting to do a PCAP on your TrueNAS VM to see if it would glean any info. Drop to the shell and figure out the name of the interface you wanna look at, wherever the SMB traffic is coming from.

You can use ip a on SCALE to figure out the name.


In my example, its eno1

Then, while you have a really really big SMB file transfer going type:
tcpdump -ni eno1 port 445 -w /mnt/ice/media/smb.pcap

And do CTRL+C after 10 or 15 seconds. In your case, eno1 should correspond with the VirtIO NIC from Proxmox’s name, and /mnt/ice/media/smb.pcap should correspond to a place, like in your SMB share, where you can easily access it.

If you send me the file, I can analze it for you.

Oh yes, it most certainly could be (assuming the OP has a RealTek NIC). Speeding up and down, and it can just stop for a while if you are unlucky.

My first FreeNAS build used a RealTek NIC, and we didn’t realize it would be such a pain in the rear. I have a full thread on the old forum doing all kinds of testing comparing RealTek to an Intel NIC I purchased as a PCIe card. A search of ‘truenas nic joeschmuck’ or maybe freenas, should find the thread. At first I thought everyone was crazy saying it is the RealTek NIC. How could that be? It worked perfectly under Windoze. Well it was true. Kind of like how a SATA cable can work for years and then suddenly go bad, with no outside intervention.

Thanks @NickF1227 for bringing me into the conversation.

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The Realtek PCI device you see in the overview of PCI Passthrough is the WiFi card and not the ethernet NIC, the ethernet is Intel

Now my Scale instance boots and crashes after 2-3 minutes. I didn’t change something over night. I also have no logs.

I think SCALE is really not designed to virtualize. I’ll go back to CORE because this runs very stable in version 13.0 U6.1 and try the USB, PCI passthrough thing with CORE as VM

I run both CORE and SCALE on ESXi without any issues. I actually flip/flop between the two VM boot drives (CORE/SCALE) on two different machines and both work very well. But I do not use Proxmox (yet). One day when I can no longer get ESXi updates then Proxmox, I guess. Oh yes, on both systems I pass through the entire drive controller for the Pool drives.

How do you have that connected to the TrueNAS VM? I imagine you have a virtual switch you are connecting to, or are you passing through an entire NIC?

Last question and maybe you already answered this… Can you roll back to TrueNAS CORE? You should be able to provided you did not update the feature flags. Rolling back could temporarily resolve your problems and then you could systematically troubleshoot the issue. For example, did you upgrade via Internet or from an upgrade or maybe reinstalled from the ISO and restored your configuration file. Sometimes an Internet upgrade does not go so well. I can’t tell you why, just that it has happened and I have no idea why. I will try an internet update but when changing from CORE to SCALE, I prefer not using the internet option. Personal preference I guess. But this is also something you might look into.

I wish I knew more about Proxmox, then I could give better advice on the topic.

Best of luck.

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I rolled back to CORE, because SCALE didn’t run stable as a VM. The very first boot was stable, but when I rebooted the VM crashed after a couple of minutes without any special config.

I also passed the whole USB 3 controller to the VM because just USB Passtrough caused very very long boot time. I don’t know why but the boot process stucked very long at this point “da3: quirks=0x2<NO_6_BYTE>”. According to the text it was right after the VM checked the USB ports.

And to your question: No I don’t saved anything, everytime I start from stratch.
Its not too many data to transfer again to the drives and because I want to avoid saving misconfigured stuff to a config file

It is very fast to setup a new VM in proxmox, once you know where to click its done in seconds :slight_smile:

Its a virtualized NIC from proxmox VM setup manager
→ VirtIO Paravirtualized, I guess its something like a vSwitch in the end

Out of curiosity, and it may have nothing to do with your issues, did you do some stability/burn in testing on your system? That should have nothing to do with a slow network performance but crashing, possibly.