Extremely slow file transfer after 2.3 update?

[karl-petter]

Hi Johannes,

now when I got the 4G dongle to work on my PC I did a final test that it still didnt work before sending you the login info etc, and guess what? Now it took just five minutes to copy 7 Gb! So now all works as expected!

Do not know what I had done wrong before. I tried to setup all as before(as in the drawing above) and it works well. Is there any difference in doing a shutdown or a restart? Before when you asked me I did a restart but today I did a shutdown of the B3 before I did setup the 4G on the PC.

Thanks for you efforts and great support!

/Kalle

[johannes]

Ok, I can't explain that either but let us just hope the problem is gone now.

[RandomUsername]

This is the first time since the 2.3 update I've really tried to transfer files to/from my B3 via Samba and I'm also seeing very slow speeds on both Ubuntu and Windows 7 clients. FTP is working as expected. More investigations to follow...

[RandomUsername]

OK, very weird. Writing data to and from the B3 over ethernet is fine. Copying data from the B3 over wi-fi is fine. Writing data to the B3 over wi-fi is pig slow. This is in in Ubuntu and Windows 7 (but both on the same laptop) so I don't know if this is an issue with the wi-fi card in my laptop, the wi-fi on the b3 or Samba on the B3.

Any ideas anyone?

[Cheeseboy]

Hi Darren,

Writing data to the B3 over wi-fi is pig slow.

Pigs are surprisingly quick. I doubt you could outrun one...

I just did this quick and dirty test from my work laptop (Win XP, Cygwin). I have mapped my b3 home directory as Z: on the Windows laptop. It is connected over wifi. I have not touched the SMB settings on the b3. It seems to be a bit slower to push the file to the b3 than the other way around, but not by much.

So it would seem like the problem is specific to your setup...

Cheers,

Niklas

Code: Select all

???@??? ~
$ dd if=/dev/zero of=dummy bs=1M count=10
10+0 records in
10+0 records out
10485760 bytes (10 MB) copied, 0.722034 s, 14.5 MB/s

???@??? ~
$ time cp -v ./dummy /cygdrive/z/dummy
`./dummy' -> `/cygdrive/z/dummy'

real    0m6.748s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.671s

???@???
$ time cp -v /cygdrive/z/dummy ./dummy2
`/cygdrive/z/dummy' -> `./dummy2'

real    0m5.157s
user    0m0.046s
sys     0m0.218s

???@??? ~
$ cat /proc/version
CYGWIN_NT-5.1 1.7.9(0.237/5/3) 2011-03-29 10:10

[RandomUsername]

Pigs are surprisingly quick. I doubt you could outrun one...

:p

Thanks for testing. I'm sure it wasn't like this until fairly recently and the only thing that's changed in the meantime is the B3 update.

Been playing around all weekend and the problem is also affecting ftp and other protocols despite my earlier comments. The weird thing is, throughput to and from the Internet is fine. I can upload files to the net fast than I can write them to the B3. Very strange. I'd say it was the disk if it wasn't for the fact that there are no problems over ethernet. I dunno.

[johannes]

A long shot, but we had some memory leak issues (album generator and diskmanager) that got solved with 2.3.2. I don't think those would manifest under normal usage but you never know. Any improvement after upgrading to 2.3.2?

[RandomUsername]

A long shot, but we had some memory leak issues (album generator and diskmanager) that got solved with 2.3.2. I don't think those would manifest under normal usage but you never know. Any improvement after upgrading to 2.3.2?

Not really. Thanks though.

[Nrde]

OK, very weird. Writing data to and from the B3 over ethernet is fine. Copying data from the B3 over wi-fi is fine. Writing data to the B3 over wi-fi is pig slow. This is in in Ubuntu and Windows 7 (but both on the same laptop) so I don't know if this is an issue with the wi-fi card in my laptop, the wi-fi on the b3 or Samba on the B3.

Any ideas anyone?

Are you sure the traffic through WIFI isn't going through your internet router for some odd reason? Not sure how to check for that either.

[RandomUsername]

OK, very weird. Writing data to and from the B3 over ethernet is fine. Copying data from the B3 over wi-fi is fine. Writing data to the B3 over wi-fi is pig slow. This is in in Ubuntu and Windows 7 (but both on the same laptop) so I don't know if this is an issue with the wi-fi card in my laptop, the wi-fi on the b3 or Samba on the B3.

Any ideas anyone?

Are you sure the traffic through WIFI isn't going through your internet router for some odd reason? Not sure how to check for that either.

Yeah, I've thought about that but 1. Samba ports are not open on WAN, and 2. I'm connecting using either local DNS name or private IP address so neither of those should be reachable from the Internet (I think).

Although it's not made a huge difference I did find a speed increase when I moved my cordless phone base station a bit further away from the B3. It was where it always was though so I don't think that's the cause of these sudden difficulties. The room my B3 is in is due for a re-arrange soon so I will move some stuff and see if it improves performance.

Thanks all for the responses so far.

[Ubi]

would you be able to run InSSIDER or a spectrum analyzer to see if there is a crowd on your wifi channel?

[RandomUsername]

would you be able to run InSSIDER or a spectrum analyzer to see if there is a crowd on your wifi channel?

O
I've done that because I do seem to be battling with generally slow wifi speeds as well (rather than it being specific to samba). I changed the channel the B3 works on and it seems OK now with the exception of writing to the server over samba.

The problem I have is that the room my B3 is in is nominally a study but has become a storage room (the price of having three young children - the house is never tidy anymore). My desktop PC is buried in there somewhere and is connected with Ethernet. Until we sort out the room and I can get to both the PC and B3 so I can run some proper comparison tests etc I'm kind of just flailing around a bit.

[RandomUsername]

OK, finally found some time to test this a bit more thoroughly.

These are the speed results with various wifi settings:

Legacy (802.11g) mode, with no encryption, speed is ~3 MB/s
Legacy (802.11g) mode with WPA2, speed is ~1MB/s
Mixed (802.11g + 802.11n) mode with WPA2, speed is ~200 KB/s if I'm lucky.

So...could this be a limitation of the CPU? I would think the B3 has enough grunt to handle this. Could be dodgy drivers?

[Nrde]

So...could this be a limitation of the CPU? I would think the B3 has enough grunt to handle this. Could be dodgy drivers?

I get a lot faster speeds so it must be something related to your unit or environment.

[RandomUsername]

Well, I only have one laptop to try it on but I have both Windows 7 and Ubuntu on it. I suppose it could be related to the chip on the laptop. I will try to source a different one to test it with.