SMB Share very slow transfer speeds

OK, So Copying a 750MB film to my desktop PC, it's back to old speeds again...

2.5MB/S (after waking up the drive)

Running Top before the copy, CPU usage was 3% (Transmission was using 1%) The machine was doing nothing else at the time.

Now (During the copy, smbd is using 4%, php5 3%, Transmission 1%, kworker/1:2 1%) But load is 1.28 (PC is Dual Core)

Cut and paste from TOP

top - 02:32:00 up 2 days, 4:05, 1 user, load average: 1.16, 1.01, 0.54
Tasks: 127 total, 1 running, 126 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
Cpu(s): 0.2%us, 1.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 51.7%id, 46.1%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.2%si, 0.0%st
Mem: 7792608k total, 6998268k used, 794340k free, 1044332k buffers
Swap: 3212284k total, 0k used, 3212284k free, 3684976k cached

The cut and paste was during the file transfer...

The PC I'm copying to is a Windows 7 64 Bit PC, AMD Quad Core A10-5800K APU 3.8Ghz, 8GB Ram

Client PC is not doing much, a few tabs of chrome open, internet radio playing, file transfer from OMV box, Processor load ~ 5%, Ram Available 4.5GB

Network is:-

HP 1810-24G Switch Connected to OMV box (1m cable), Windows 7 Client PC (5m cable with patch lead and wall socket in the way), Internet is through Netgear Wifi router. There is an aditional 2 wifi routers elsewhere in the house. As it's 2am here, all the other client PC's / Laptops e.t.c. are switched off.

Switch is as it was out of the box.

The wifi router is out of the box, but has some port forwarding for transmission. Another wifi router is just an access point. The other has a VPN tunnel into work.

I can't think of anything else that would affect the file transfer...

Damian

A bit more background... before installing the new backports kernel, load would be very high (4 or 5) when using the server (web interface open, a file transfer running, Transmission running (although it was the same before I installed transmission), CPU usage would be low (less than 10%).

After installing the new kernel, load seems to be lower, cpu usage about the same, but real life transfer speed, better but variable, sometimes 20-30MB/s, other times much slower 1-5MB/s...

I wanted to touch on this thread, as I've been googling for the last few hours trying to figure out this issue.

Very similar situation as from my windows PC, I would access the SMB file share thru UNC. I would drag and drop files over, the first bit of the file would load in the HDD cache, hit 112 MB and then POOF. would die down to 1MB/s.

I'm running proxmox on a capable i5-4690k home server.

Resources tied to VM are as follows:

4 vCPUs ( 1 socket x 4 cores )
bios = OVMF (UEFI)
scsi controller = default (LSI 53C895A)
hard disk 0 = SATA = SSD. 16 gb
hard disk 1 = SATA = HDD. 4 TB.
network device = VirtIO

OKAY SO.

Within OMV. You need to format the storage disk, in my case as XFS.

The only things i've changed while my testing was initially I formatted my virtual disk ( on the HDD ) as BTRFS. Had the same issue with SMB file transfer being quick cause caching, then once that cache fills POOF slow transfer.

THEN i tried EXT4. TOOK FOREVER to format. I figured at this point it wouldn't work but I tested again. once it finished its format. Tested the same file transfer, same issue as BTRFS. Cache filled and POOF slow transfer.

IF YOU AREN'T READING THIS AND ARE LOOKING JUST FOR THE ANSWER PLEASE READ THIS PART.

The only thing differently that I've changed was the formatting of my HDD ( yes its virtual so its really just a virtual hard disk formatted under the VMDK format ( just incase I need to boot into workstation )

FORMAT YOUR DISK TO XFS. After more and more research it looks like XFS is optimized to handle these large files. I don't know the details of it, you can look at part up. However I'm able to max out my gigabit connection and my hard drive write speeds to get 112 MB/S

I hope this works for you Mr. Reader.