I recently posted about upgrading my media server and migrating off Windows to Proxmox. I’ve been following an excellent guide from TechHut on YouTube but have run into issues migrating my media into the new Proxmox setup.

Both my old Windows machine and new Proxmox host have 2.5Gb NIC cards and are connected together with a 2.5Gb switch and running on the same subnet. Following the guide, I’ve created a ZFS pool with 7x14TB drives and created an Ubuntu LXC which is running Cockpit to create Samba shares.

When transferring files from Windows, I’m only seeing 100MB/s speeds on the initial transfer and every other transfer after that caps out at >10MB/s until I reboot the Cockpit container and the cycle completes.

I’m not very knowledgeable on Proxmox or Linux but have run an iperf3 test between Windows > Proxmox and Windows > Cockpit container and both show roughly 2.5Gb transfer speeds yet I am still limited when transferring files.

Googling the issue brings up some troubleshooting steps but I don’t understand a lot of it. One fix was to disable IPv6 in Proxmox (I dont have this setup on my network), which was successful, but didn’t fix anything. I no longer see the interface when doing an ‘ip a’ command in Proxmox, though I do still see it when doing it in the SMB container.

Does anybody have any experience with this that can offer a solution or path toward finding a solution? I have roughly 40TB of media to transfer and 8MB/s isn’t going to cut it.

  • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
    8·
    2 days ago

    Does the Proxmox host have the driver installed for your 2.5Gb NIC? Can’t use it if it’s not installed. Connect to the host and run ethtool <device>. Should show the link speed as Speed: .

    I have roughly 40TB of media to transfer and 8MB/s isn’t going to cut it.

    If you need ultra-speed data, why not do a 100GbE switch with JBOD? 40TB isn’t a small amount of data. Generally no matter what setup you have it’s going to take a significant amount of time to swap data here.

    • CmdrShepard42@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      23 hours ago

      I’ve had a chance to run this and ethtool is showing 2500Mb/s for the speed on the host. I also tried it on the bridge and inside the container and those both show “10000Mb/s”

    • CmdrShepard42@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      2·
      2 days ago

      I haven’t installed any drivers on the Proxmox machine. That one has the 2.5Gb NIC built into the motherboard so I probably misspoke when I called it a “card” in the OP if that makes a difference. I’ll try this when I get home but I have run ‘lspci’ and it shows the NIC on both the host and container (Intel Killer 3100 2.5Gb though it’s listen as Killer 3000 2.5Gb) plus my iperf3 tests were showing ~2.3Gb speeds between both machines and the container.

      As far as the 100GBe switch, I only need to transfer the media off the old machine once so I was just trying to go with something inexpensive since the standard 1Gb ethernet should be fine for most things after this initial transfer.

    • Possibly linux@lemmy.zipEnglish
      12·
      2 days ago

      Linux doesn’t have drivers like Windows does. The kernel either supports the hardware or it doesn’t.

      • Xanza@lemm.eeEnglish
        7·
        2 days ago

        This is categorically untrue. The kernel includes most open source drivers however it does not include proprietary drivers (or even all open source drivers) which require recompiling the kernel itself or installing secondary headers…

        I’ve used many networking cards in the past that required you to recompile the kernel for them to work properly…

  • some_dude@lemm.eeEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    I, like you, will be migrating from Windows to ProxMox soon. Can you give a link to the guide you mentioned?

  • ikidd@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    What’s your throughput to another Windows box from your source machine? Samba isn’t known as a fast transfer protocol. You could also try NFS services on the windows box and export your shares to try that.

    You might also enable jumbo frames if it’s a lot of larger files.

  • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1·
    1 day ago

    Lots of variables here, we would need to pare them down:

    • architecture of zfs pool? This can be done well or very poorly, zfs gives you a lot of rope, if you know what I mean.
    • memory?
    • have you tuned samba ?
    • are you trying to do anything fancy like jumbo frames ?
    • what networking equipment lies between the two?
    • do you have the correct and correctly configured 2.5gb driver for linux ? Intel 2.5 NICs had some issues for a while.
    • what does the windows net hardware look like?

    In troubleshooting transfer speeds , there are solo many variables, as you can see.

    Start with the network and reduce variables until you have a likely source of the problem.

    • CmdrShepard42@lemm.eeOPEnglish
      1·
      22 hours ago

      • Not sure what all to include here but the pool set up in Proxmox as RAIDZ2 with lz4 compression.

      • 64GB DDR5 that is showing low utilization the entire time. It has never gone over 10GB usage.

      • I have not done any tuning or enabled jumbo frames on samba

      • Both machines are sitting next to one another and connected to a 2.5Gb switch that is also connected to my router’s 1Gb ports. From what I gather, they shouldn’t need to communicate through the router since they’re on the same subnet and everything.

      • I haven’t installed any drivers, but another user suggested using the ethtool command on the NIC and it’s showing a 2.5Gb connection speed.

      • The windows machine has a Realtec RTL8125B 2.5Gb PCIe network card that I just purchased for this purpose. Previously I was using the motherboards built in 1Gb NIC. I have installed the driver for this on the windows machine.

  • rdschouw@lemmy.worldEnglish
    2·
    2 days ago

    Can you do a speed test of your zpool?

    dd if=/dev/null of=<mount-point>/test.file bs=1G count=10 status=progress

    • non_burglar@lemmy.worldEnglish
      2·
      1 day ago

      dd if=/dev/null of=<mount-point>/test.file bs=1G count=10 status=progress

      /dev/null tests from dd are not an accurate indicator of performance unless you only have one disk in your pool. fio is a much more accurate tool for zfs pool testing.

  • IsoKiero@sopuli.xyzEnglish
    21·
    2 days ago

    How much RAM your system has? Zfs is pretty hungry for memory and if you don’t have enough it’ll have quite significant impact on performance. My proxmox had 7x4TB drives on zfs pool and with 32 gigs of RAM there was practically nothing left for the VMs under heavy i/o load.

    I switched the whole setup to software raid, but it’s not offically supported by proxmox and thus managing it is not quite trivial.

  • dbtng@eviltoast.orgEnglish
    11·
    2 days ago

    I don’t know about the Ubuntu LCX. I don’t container much.

    I’d do this with a virtual machine and TrueNAS. Those are just the tools I like to use. The TrueNAS Scale ISO will install qemu-guest-agent, so you don’t need to worry about drivers. Make sure to build it with Virtio SCSI Single disk controllers. Use one 50gb OS disk for the install. Add huge data disk(s) after the install.
    Promox Disk options … SSD emulation, Discard, IO Thread, No cache … and I use Write Back (unsafe). Use the Virtio NIC.

    And try it again. Hopefully faster this time.

        • CmdrShepard42@lemm.eeOPEnglish
          2·
          17 hours ago

          I don’t believe that’s my issue as none of the drives are even reaching 50% utilization on either end and it also doesn’t explain why initial transfers hold at a consistent 100MB/s but every transfer after that limits to >10MB/s until I restart the samba service on the container.