Apple Video Environment -SLOW

[robertdalco]

Hello,

I am playing with a buddies Open-e home brew appliance in a video editing environment and am having problems with read performance.

Appliance Configuration: SuperMicro, Dual Quad core 2.5GHz XEON, 4GB RAM, Areca 12x0 RAID controller configured for RAID5 with 512MB cache, 16 1TB Seagate disks. five iSCSI volumes are formated in XFS format by apple OS. Two 1Gbe Intel Pro1000 trunked

USER CONFIG: Qty 5 Apple file servers serving Apple Desktop running Final Cut Pro, dual port Intel Pro1000 trunked on each server. So I theoretically am maintaining a 2Gbe pipe from each server to their associated iSCSI volume

NETWORK CONFIG: dual Cisco 2960's

FILE SIZES: 500MB to2TB most typically 1GB in size

PROBLEM: This config is yielding read transfer speeds between any one server and its associated iSCSI volume of only 30 MB/s. Now it is a little faster for the smaller 500MB video files but not much.

I was hoping by trunking the ports I would get close to 300MB/s. So I tried just a single 1Gbe line network config and the performance remained the same - slow 30MB/s. I tried reconfiguring the RAID controller to RAID3 and played with stripe size. Same old same old 30MB/s.

I have a ton of horsepower, lots of memory so I must be missing something here. Can someone help out here?

Thanks,

Robert.

[asaph07]

Robert,

You're not going to increase your transfer speed by bonding the ports.

But here's a question: Have you enabled all the cache settings on your Areca controller?

And here's a suggestion:

Go download your log file from the GUI and look at the test.log.
Look specifically at the hdparm and see what it's showing.

Go to the Status, Hardware tab, scroll down to Logs.
Download to your hard disk. Then right click on it to view the files. Look for the test.log.
Right click on that to view the file.

-Asaph

[robertdalco]

I have the log files and can find the HDPARM but don't know what I am looking at. What do you want to see.

Robert

[vkeven]

I have the log files and can find the HDPARM but don't know what I am looking at. What do you want to see.

Robert

How much MB/s

[robertdalco]

Max I get on large video files is 30MB/s. As a NAS or iSCSItransfer. Was thinking I should get between 60 and 90 MB/s -preferably on the high side

Robert

[vkeven]

Max I get on large video files is 30MB/s. As a NAS or iSCSItransfer. Was thinking I should get between 60 and 90 MB/s -preferably on the high side

Robert

open test.log with a text editor and find this line

hdparm -t

you should find a line like this one ( but with your number )

Timing buffered disk reads: 208 MB in 3.02 seconds = 68.95 MB/sec

post here the xx.xxMB/s you have