Samba Performance Orange Pi 3

[LoSt96]

Hello,

 

I am using armbian now for some time as a smb server on my Orange Pi 3. It's working but I am not really happy with the performance. I only get write speeds up to 30-40 MB/s.

On netdata I saw that the cpu utilization is very unstable. The writing speed on the hdd is also not constant and oscillating like the cpu utilization.

 

Does anybody have a clue why I have this oscillating cpu utilization and the low samba performance?

Are there any tweaks to improve the performance?

 

Short infos about the used system

• newest armbian version
• all devices connected over Gigabit LAN
• 2,5" USB 3.0 HDD connected on the blue USB port of the orange pi 3
• HDD currently formatted as NTFS, but I already tried ext4 which made no improvement

 

Best Regards

Stephan

[Igor]

1 hour ago, LoSt96 said:

newest armbian version

Which comes in many different variants. Perhaps this is a problem.
 

1 hour ago, LoSt96 said:

Short infos about the used system

We only want one thing, everything  Full logs, otherwise we don't know what you are talking about. Dead serious.

[LoSt96]

Hello,

 

here is the log: http://ix.io/3BPk

 

It really seams to be the same problem because I also use Debian Buster.

Currently Armbian Debian is installed at the emmc storage of the orange pi.

If I install Armbian Focal on the SD card I can test this build without destroying the Debian build on the emmc, or? 

[Igor]

1 hour ago, LoSt96 said:

If I install Armbian Focal on the SD card I can test this build without destroying the Debian build on the emmc, or? 

 

If you don't issue "install to eMMC" you are fine.

[LoSt96]

I now made some tests with Armbian Focal.

Here is the log of this system: http://ix.io/3BR8

The samba performance is the same like with Armbian Buster.

Additionally I tested the perfomance with a USB3 SSD which is formatted as ext4. With a Windows PC and ntfs file system this SSD is capable to read and write about 300MB/s.

With samba i get write speeds of about 60MB/s (the first 2 seconds I have write speeds of 110MB/s). In netdata is the iowait value at about 30% and the SSD utilization constant at 100% while writing.

The read speed is about 90 MB/s.

After that I tested the write speed with the dd command. The SSD achieves 70MB/s and the HDD 77MB/s.

The HDD with ntfs is even faster than the SSD with ext4.

Why is my SSD so slow? I am doing something wrong or is that the performance to expect of the Orange Pi 3?   

 

 

[LoSt96]

Hello,

Does anyone have experience how the USB 3 speeds are with the Orange Pi 3? Are the measured speeds with the SSD normal?

Is there anything I can do or test to help?

Unfortunately, I am not a programmer and can analyze and solve the problem myself.

Regards

Stephan

[tparys]

3 hours ago, LoSt96 said:

Is there anything I can do or test to help?

Unfortunately, I am not a programmer and can analyze and solve the problem myself.

 

Unless someone else has your exact combination of hardware and setting, or this is a known issue, no one else will be able to diagnose this issue for you.

 

NTFS support under Linux has historically been poor. The in-kernel driver does not support safe I/O, and the userspace ntfs-3g package can be quite slow. There are many well supported filesystems (ext4, xfs, jfs, etc ..) under Linux, and this is not one of them.

 

Samba also has it's own issues, and may need to tweaked to get better performance. I seem to remember it defaulting to the very slow SMB1 protocol in the past. Though this may have changed with newer versions. You might need to consult the documentation, or try a different remote access software such as NFS or FTP to see it's your hardware limiting your performance.

 

You also may want to try to benchmark your drive without a filesystem via hdparm or dd, and your network via iperf, and see what your combination of hardware can do as an ideal upper limit. You can further benchmark each filesystem via iozone, bonnie++, or many other tools. Just note that USB drives are asynchronous, so writes seem quite fast initially, but quickly slow down as the internal memory buffers fill up and wait for the hardware to catch up.

 

If you do need faster speed, you may need to invest in one of the supported boards that has a dedicated SATA port (non-USB) and is more suited for that purpose.