I own a Synology DS409 and observe low throughput (13 Mo/s) on big files transfer over my local network. This is far too slow compared to the disk and network theoretical speed. The following investigation shows that the performance issue can be partially explained by the fragmentation. Let’s go.

The NAS has four hard drives.

$ fdisk -l
#=> sda, sdb, sdc, sdd

First we have to figure-out whether the performance issue is caused by defective hardware. Let’s measure the read speed through the Linux cache. This command bypasses the filesystem API and is a good indicator of hardware and driver speed. The cache is cleared during the test to ensure accurate measurement.

$ hdparm -t /dev/sda
#=> /dev/sda:
#=> Timing buffered disk reads: 72 MB in 3.01 seconds = 23.91 MB/sec

The average measured performance of the disks is 85.4 Mo/s, 89.2 Mo/s, 120.8 Mo/s, 122.5 Mo/s. These values looks correct, the standard deviation for each individual hdd is low, and the difference between the drives is due to different hardware. Given that the raw disk read is fast, the bottleneck is not the hardware.

Let’s try to read a complete file through the file system API.

$ time sh -c "cat /volume0/bigfile > /dev/null"

The averaged file read throughput is 14.5 Mo/s, which is far below the previous figures. The poor performance only occurs when reading through the file system API.

Let’s get more information about the file systems and partitions:

$ mount
#=> /dev/md2 on /volume1 type ext3 (usrquota,grpquota)
#=> /dev/md3 on /volume2 type ext4 (usrjquota=aquota.user,grpjquota=aquota.group,jqfmt=vfsv0,synoacl)

md stands for multiple device driver. There are several physical devices for these logical device. The following command helps to know what is under the hood:

$  mdadm --detail /dev/md2

md2 and md3 are two multiple device driver made respectively of a JBOD of sda+sdb and a RAID1 of sdc+sdd.

Is the file fragmented? The file system splits the file into blocks. A block is the basic unit of storage on a disk. The following command shows the block size on this partition:

$ tune2fs -l /dev/md2

The blocks are 4096 octets. Let’s display the number of the block that have been picked to store the file on the hard drive.

$ debugfs /dev/md2 -C "stat /public/big"

I processed the output with a python program and detected 28352 contiguous bloc segment. Wow, I picked that file randomly, I guess the whole drive is scrambled that way.

Last but not least, here is a command to check the fragmentation level of all files over 100 Mo. I installed ipkg & filefrag to help.

$  find /volume1 /volume2  ! \( -name @* -prune \) -type f -size +100000 -exec filefrag -B {}  \; | tee fragreport

When I duplicate the file the new instance is not fragmented, and the file read speed is 47.5 Mo/s. Even without fragmentation the raw drive speed is no reached but I will have to defrag my drive first before investigating further.

It is common to heard that Linux file systems have no fragmentation issue, unfortunately it is not always true.