expected performance from CIFS (throughput)?

[m_lubinski]

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...

[christin]

This sounds like a support related question. If you have an active NetApp Support login, there are subject matter experts in the NetApp Support Community that may help answer your questions.

If this is an urgent issue please open a case with NetApp Technical Support.

Regards,

Christine

[SAROJ_144]

Hi Dave Greenfield,

The list you given is suprb...Thank you very much some times in my environment we got an alert like "cifs perf latency breached" and also the same in nfs like nfs perf latency breached so please suggest how can i fix this issue.

Thanks,

Saroj Sahu

Netapp Storage Admin.

+91-9912903814

[DRUMDUDESAN]

Hi

Panagiotis Karaberis

,

You have it running on a Windows 2003 server so that is SMB1 and you have SMB2 disabled on your filer.

- Move from Windows 2003 to Windows 2008/7 or higher

- Enable SMB2 on your filer like the guys mentioned in this thread.

- see

Comparing the Network Performance of Windows File Sharing Environments

Dan Chilton, Srinivas Addanki, NetApp April 2012 | TR-3869

I had a huge improvement in following this.

Cheers

Jeff

[WALZNETAPP]

I had a similar problem with all of my filers and I found this issue to be resolved by doing the following.

Check to see if your VIF interfaces have flow control enabled and set to full.  If so, disable flow control completely and watch your CIFS performance increase exponentially.  I have seen this issue when flow control is enabled as full, when it should be set to either send only or disabled.  If the switch doesn't have flow control enabled at all, there is really no reason to have it be enabled.  I literally saw a ~25MB/sec max throughput go to 150 - 200MB+ / sec after making this change.