Extremely slow SMB

[jose13lilt]

the local network is very very slow, I have several shared folders on the network but it takes minutes to load the content, with the previous ISP router the smb worked better, what could be happening, is it dumaos not very powerful for this type of task?

[Fuzy]

It comes from the power of the router! With the file transfer via SMB on the XR500 with a usb3 ssd, I only get 30mb/s max... You can always ask Netgear... The best is to transfer your files in FTP. much faster because I have a Gbps connection!

Edit : SMB transfers tend to saturate the cpu of the router, which can lead to a disconnection or something else!

[Netduma Liam]

Welcome to the forum! Great answer above from Fuzy. Could you let us know roughly the sort of speeds you're seeing?

[jose13lilt]

FTP works fine, but it doesn't work for me, I need SMB yes or yes, but SMB is extremely slow, to read what is inside a folder it takes several minutes, I don't know why it is so slow, but with an ISP router it works perfectly .

Today I was testing, if the SMB is mounted on the wired network, and another computer is wired, it works fine,
but if the SMB is mounted by cable, and you try to access it from a laptop via wifi, it is when it is extremely slow, the internet connection via wifi shows me that it is high, then I do not understand what happens.

[Netduma Liam]

That's interesting, do you know the speeds that it transfers at over wireless vs. over wired approximately? I'd expect wireless to be slower, for sure, but not to the point where it's almost unusable.

[jose13lilt]

It is impossible to transfer SMB via Wi-Fi, apart from being slow it is super unstable, it loses connection with the SMB device, by cable it works perfectly, but via Wi-Fi, when trying to read the folder it takes a long time and even loses the connection, if you try to transfer it can't do it, it stays calculating and then loses the connection.
but this router (Arcadyan PRV3399B-B-LT) can be found for €7 on the internet, it is the one provided by the ISP here in Spain, and with it the SMB works perfectly both by wifi and by cable,
Is it possible that the failure is due to a bad system optimization that separates the wired LAN network from the wireless LAN and has problems interacting between these interfaces?

[jose13lilt]

All this is with router mode configured with ONT WAN connection, now I am testing with Access Point, and it seems to work better, but my intention is to remove the ISP Router, and use my XR500 as a network router.

[Fuzy]

of memory the smb protocol on the xr series is 1
maybe it should be installed with w10 upstream...

[Netduma Liam]

3 hours ago, jose13lilt said:

All this is with router mode configured with ONT WAN connection, now I am testing with Access Point, and it seems to work better, but my intention is to remove the ISP Router, and use my XR500 as a network router.

What are the speeds with the XR in AP mode? Could you please take it out of AP mode, then go and completely disable QoS from the three-line menu in Congestion Control and see if that's better?

[jose13lilt]

in AP mode it works fine, in router mode with QoS disabled it doesn't,

[Netduma Liam]

1 hour ago, jose13lilt said:

in AP mode it works fine, in router mode with QoS disabled it doesn't,

Is the SMB device connected to the XR or is it connected to the upstream modem? If the latter, what's the make and model of the modem?

[jose13lilt]

44 minutes ago, Netduma Liam said:

Is the SMB device connected to the XR or is it connected to the upstream modem? If the latter, what's the make and model of the modem?

SMB is connected to the XR500 in AP MODE

[jose13lilt]

the ascending modem (ISP router) is Arcadyan PRV3399B-B-LT I explain how I have the network set up:

Arcadyan PRV3399B-B-LT to Fiber Optic ONT (wifi disabled, only one LAN port occupied by XR500)

XR500 (AP mode) to Arcadyan PRV3399B-B-LT

small devices via RJ45 CAT-5e to a 1Gb switch on each connector

switch by RJ45 CAT-
8 to XR500

SMB server by RJ45 CAT-8 to XR500

2.4G wifi devices to XR500

5G wifi devices to XR500

(I had previously mounted this same network only with Arcadyan PRV3399B-B-LT) I wanted to replace the router with the XR500 because it was more powerful.

I replaced the router with the XR500 and had the problem that I have mentioned,
so I did the following test:

XR500 router mode:

(only 3 devices on the network)

XR500 to ONT Fiber Optic

SMB server by RJ45 CAT-8 to XR500

PC by RJ45 CAT-8 to XR500

Lapptop by wifi 5G to XR500

Wired PC connection to SMB server Works fine
Laptop connection by wifi 5G to SMB server Does not work well
laptop connection by wifi 2,4G to SMB server not working well

connection with another different laptop by 5G Wi-Fi to SMB server does not work well

connection with a different laptop by wifi 2.4G to SMB server does not work well

[jose13lilt]

in AP MODE it works fine, but I want to replace the ISP router (it is valued at 7$)

[Netduma Liam]

Do you have SmartConnect enabled on the Wireless Settings of the XR500?

Could you open up System Information and watch the CPU usage graph, then start a transfer and see if the usage spikes at all? Let us know the results of that.

[jose13lilt]

15 hours ago, Netduma Liam said:

Do you have SmartConnect enabled on the Wireless Settings of the XR500?

Could you open up System Information and watch the CPU usage graph, then start a transfer and see if the usage spikes at all? Let us know the results of that.

smartconnect was disabled, I also tried disabling coexistence

[Netduma Liam]

4 hours ago, jose13lilt said:

smartconnect was disabled, I also tried disabling coexistence

Is there any excessive CPU usage when you're trying to transfer over Wi-Fi?

[jose13lilt]

22 hours ago, Netduma Liam said:

Is there any excessive CPU usage when you're trying to transfer over Wi-Fi?

I'm sorry, I can do the tests for a week, now I'm on holidays

[Netduma Liam]

2 hours ago, jose13lilt said:

I'm sorry, I can do the tests for a week, now I'm on holidays

OK not to worry, let us know when you're available and we can pick this up again.

[Bert]

On 7/29/2022 at 3:37 PM, Fuzy said:

It comes from the power of the router! With the file transfer via SMB on the XR500 with a usb3 ssd, I only get 30mb/s max... You can always ask Netgear... The best is to transfer your files in FTP. much faster because I have a Gbps connection!

Edit : SMB transfers tend to saturate the cpu of the router, which can lead to a disconnection or something else!

I think you are referring to having a disk connected to the router's USB?

 

For me the XR500 seems limited to 80 MB/s in router mode and no restriction (120mb/s) in AP mode. XR700 does 200 MB/s if fed off a SSD.

 

For device to device transfers, the router's CPU has nothing to do with it as there is hardly any routing involved.

 

On SMB networking, just like any other TCP/IP connection it's very sensitive to starts and stops in transmissions. Ie dropped packets it will slow the transmission down. So over wifi this is probably exaggerated. 

 

I would try and use a different tool first, ie Iperf3 and test speed on the actual connection between the laptop and the SMB server and take it from there.

[Fuzy]

11 hours ago, Bert said:

I think you are referring to having a disk connected to the router's USB?

 

For me the XR500 seems limited to 80 MB/s in router mode and no restriction (120mb/s) in AP mode. XR700 does 200 MB/s if fed off a SSD.

 

For device to device transfers, the router's CPU has nothing to do with it as there is hardly any routing involved.

 

On SMB networking, just like any other TCP/IP connection it's very sensitive to starts and stops in transmissions. Ie dropped packets it will slow the transmission down. So over wifi this is probably exaggerated. 

 

I would try and use a different tool first, ie Iperf3 and test speed on the actual connection between the laptop and the SMB server and take it from there.

Thank you for your always informed feedback!

I had not redone the test and had based myself on assumptions. However, I remain far from your transfer rates...

Here's how the XR500 behaves in AP mode with SMB transfers to a usb3 SSD and vice versa.

 

WIRED :

WIRELESS :

What intrigues me on the other hand is the asymmetrical wired transfer...?

[Bert]

What kind of SSD is it? I did my testing with a Samsung 860 QVO.

 

The difference in rates might be caused by buffering. The router does not have any sort of data caching. So when you copy to the disk, the router will attempt to write straight to the disk and if this is interrupted, ie by inefficiencies in the USB protocol the transferspeed will stall.

 

If the other way around, you download to your PC. What will happen is that the router will take the data off the disk and your PC writes the entire transfer in memory. It will show as complete but windows will write the data to the disk in the background. This has nearly no restrictions so no drops in data transfer other than caused by the router.

 

For windows 10 systems drive cache is 10% of available memory and for windows server systems it's 50% of available memory.

 

Also if you are attempting these copy tests you need to alternate your testing file as often the file you just copied remains in windows/drive hotcache so when you transfer it again, it's much faster.

 

When I am operating a lot of VM's on my SMB server I can see writing stalling out when the buffers in memory are full (VM's take system memory so less total memory), windows needs to flush the buffers first. This is with big files though like 30GB and transferring via 10Gbit. But it's writing to a NVME SSD RAID cluster so very little restriction there.

[Fuzy]

1 hour ago, Bert said:

What kind of SSD is it?

T5 Samsung usb3 on XR500 to NVMe WD Black in PCI-E 3200 mo/s on W10 and vice versa !

On a 10 Gbit network card W10 ... I isolated the XR500 which passed before the previous test on a switch...

I get the same results

PC to XR500 36MB/s max

XR500 to PC 110MB/s ("no write cache")

[jose13lilt]

good morning, today I'm going to do the test with the XR1000

[jose13lilt]

with the xr1000 it works perfectly, both wired - wired, wired - wifi, wifi - wifi communication.

I think that the problem may be the firmware, since the xr1000 has a different version than the xr500, I am working with the version: XR1000 1.0.0.52_1.0.38