ONTAP Discussions

expected performance from CIFS (throughput)?

m_lubinski
27,277 Views

I have a question about CIFS from Netapp filers. When I enable CIFS on my vfilers, I get strange low throughput from CIFS (from clients). Like for instance: copying folder containing 20k small files (for website) from CIFS to local disk (on dedicated windows 2008 r2 server) goes with speed ~1.5MB/s even less (drops to 400k/s). First I thought it's because of small files, but I did a test with the same folder, with 2 physical servers (windows 2008 r2) over unc shares - there was throughput of 15MB/s constantly (so 10x more).

Ok, disks are shared for different things as well (14x SATA disks in aggregate) used for NFS as well, but their load is avg 60% (each disk), so even though it should give much better performance...

I am confused about this speed, and what should be expected in that setup. Someone could say: change to FC disks, but still these 2 physical servers also have sata disks inside, and then copying just performs normally (as it should).

Can anyone point me to right direction of this, or even better - what should be expected from CIFS over Netapp? Maybe 1.5MB with small files is max what Netapp can push?

BTW, I did a test with bigger file as well (2GB) and copying was going 20MB/s (so better, but still didn't max 1Gbit connection)... And the same file (2gb) went between 2 servers with speed 100MB/s

I hope someone can help with that thing...

24 REPLIES 24
Public