Need help with some networking

[Morbid Angel]

Hey all,

I'm not really a network guy, I do what I have to do to get by. But on the recent project my basic setup was not enough so I had to expand. I bough a QNAP NAS, storage and made it a raid5. Lots of space but the network access from Maya/Max to the server is painfully laggy. It works and everything is fine, but I'm wondering if any one has any suggestions on how to improve the speed? Just opening the file menu which points to the server is lagging by like 5-10 seconds, browsing folders is also lagging by a couple of seconds, basically everything is slower...

Thanks!

[cheerioboy]

Hey,

Are all the machines connected via a gigabit switch? Some switches are labeled as 10/100 and others 10/100/1000.

Another thing is the specs on the NAS. I know my NAS has some terrible bottlenecks within it (Western Digital ShareSpace). I forget what exactly it is but there are lots of complaints that I dug up when trying to troubleshoot it myself. My NAS has similar issues; lag in the material editor when pulling a large HDRI from the NAS, also lag when initially showing the folders in the network drive. I plan in the future to get a Synology NAS drive which I've heard great things about.

Have you tried just setting up a shared partition on a node to test the speed directly between a node & workstation? I have one node that shares an extra HD with my workstation and transfering data from that location is quite snappy.

Lastly, Teracopy is a great app for windows to see the transfer speed when doing these types of tests.

Hopefully someone else has some ideas to chime in on

[Dariusz Makowski (Dadal)]

Humh

I think the reason why you guys have lag is because you bought nas that is not really up for the task of 3D... I assume that your nas max transfer speed is 24-30 mb/s. There fore to open HDR in max or so you have 5 second lag becuase 100mb hdr = 4 seconds at 25/mb/s transfer speeds.

If you want lag free environment and cheap then you better off buying small cheap PC and connecting to it 10HHD's or converting one of your nodes to storage. It can also render if properly set up.

Just because nas can support 1gb/network does not mean it will run at that speeds. Usually nas are painfully slow from my experience.

[flino2004]

if i remember well, there is a setting in most of the NAS where you can increase the speed...I think is named "jumbo frame".

[Donald2B]

Dadal is right on with this one.

Most NAS devices are not really suitable for large files and high bandwidth usage, unless you get an enterprise version. We've tried them all with all the "hack" settings to make them faster. In the end, they were just too slow! Most the NAS devices are not a hardware RAID system, therefore all the I/O requests are handled by the internal processor, which is typically pretty slow.

The best option, outside of going with nice server setup, would be to get a dedicated machine, put in a hardware raid card and then add some WD RE3 HDDs (specifically designed for running in a RAID). Also try to get a motherboard with dual nic cards for load balancing capabilities. Then you should be good to go.

I think the best transfer speed I was able to attain, with any NAS, was 48Mb/s. As the file sizes got larger, the slower it would go.

[cheerioboy]

Great tips in here - I'm surprised I've lasted this long with my NAS, I must be very patient. I think in the future I'll retire the NAS to a media/photos hub and upgrade one of my desktops into a super nas/server machine.

[Morbid Angel]

Well I got qnap nas which is an actualy system. I figured out my current issue. My main workstation was not connected directly to a switch, rather it was connected to a router and then to a switch. That was the main issue with the speed. Once I've connected it to the switch, everything became more or less fast. I can get full 1 Gbit speed on file transfers.

[cheerioboy]

Well yeah, I think all NAS drives technically are systems with processors & ram. But a lot of them aren't built for the type of abuse 3d artists might put them through. But glad to hear you solved your issues!

[Morbid Angel]

yeah I hear ya. At the office they got isilon, which is what you gotta have to run proper networking access to multiple artists. At home I got small farm + one user (me). So for now its good. But in time who knows what will happen isilon is an expensive piece though...