Advanced Server Tuning in unRAID - Get Maximum Performance Pt 1

okay guys and welcome to the first part of three in a series about tuning your unread server for maximum performance this series addresses general server tuning docker container tuning and virtual machine tuning although I've split this topic into three videos it's important not to skip to the later videos as all the parts will have things in them about server docker containers and VMs even though some sections lean more to one or another so let's get started [Music] [Music] [Music] right so fine-tuning the server hmm where do we start now I'm sure most of you are mainly interested in either fine tuning of the M or a dock container you on the best gaming performance or you want to be able to transcode lots of streams with clacks but we're going to go deeper than that you must look at the big picture whatever our goal we have to look at the server as a whole now nothing runs on its own one thing can affect another so for the best performance we have to take all factors into consideration now unfortunately it's not a simple plugin and configure formula of each environment and setup is different so the tuning is so much an art as it is a science what works on one server may not work on another yep even when the goals are the same so I'll be showing you some examples of this on my service in this video you'll see some examples on two different servers one a quad core i7 6700 server with 32 gigs of RAM and the other a 14 core Xeon 2690 with 64 gigs of ram ok so the first thing to do is look at our server and what it does we should have it set up and working already and as everything is working and setup there's just no point tuning the saga now if you're building a race car you wouldn't tune the engine before you put the wheels on so once we have everything up and running we need to break down what's on the server and the resources we have to use unread as we know has three sides to it and as docker containers and virtual machines so first let's look at the nav side so that has all of our shares and if we have a cache drive some of these will be on the cache and some of them on the array and some of them on both now we need to know this because having the array working well is the cornerstone to the server working well all of our data is somewhere on the bits we have whether it's a movie again a docker container or the M so we want the array to be well-thought-out and optimized as best we can we need to think about what this will be read and written to and how often during normal use for example normally on the cash drive you have VM images the docker image and it's also the first place data is written to before being moved to the parity protected array so you need to think are you the type of person that's downloading 24/7 other multiple torrents going up and down to your server this could theoretically affect the i/o speed on a VM running at the same time you can only find out this kind of thing by testing for example fire up a VM and use it how you normally would then deliberately download a bunch of torrents will make lots of writes to the cache and see if it affects your VM so once tested you know if this kind of thing will be a problem if it is ask yourself is it likely to happen a lot are you going to be gaming on a VM whilst downloading a lot you know can you live with this if you can't where you've got a few choices using unassigned drive to host your Vedas or use an unassigned drive to download on to but for most people an SSD cache will be sufficient for all duties right so let's start tweaking the server what we can do is we can install a few plugins and these are the ones I suggest that you install first the first one being fixed common problems and then the dynamics cache directories and then CA auto turbo write mode and then the dynamics SSD trend and finally the tips and tweaks plugin ok so then in community applications just type in fix and search from the plug-in click onto the hard drive symbol to install now once installed click done then click on the icon and then to configure the plug-in click on the kind of blue circle there the program will then scan your system and notify you of any errors it finds then you can easily just fix those errors and make yourself a run better and after you fix the chera just run the program again and let it scan and so you can see that it says you've got no errors found okay so next plug-in is the cache directories plug-in it's time to search for cache and then scroll down to dynamics cache directory is click on it install it and then go the settings your seam lines are only enabled but you also be disabled by default so click on enabled leave suspend remove the process as it is and everything else is default at the bottom here you'll see excluded and included folders where you can include or exclude that various folders from the plug-in but if you do this make sure you don't both include and exclude folders just either one or the other and when you set it up just click apply it then done and you should find that this plug-in will make browsing shares a little bit faster okay so next Auto turbo write mode just do a search for turbo and again as before just install the plug-in then go to the settings there make sure enable automatic turbo mode is set for yes and then below we can set how many disks are array are allowed to be spun down before invoking turbo write mode and I have four data drives in my array so I've set mine here to one so there has to be three of my drives spun up in order to enable turbo right and in this section at the bottom here we can enable a schedule if we want to so we can disable this function ship say join the night time this is really no point in having the turbo right going on that night while we're sleeping we don't really care about fast write speeds at that time so just set that to how you want it then click apply and done and the next plug-in the Dynamics SSD trim plug-in obviously only install if you have an SSD drive so just do a search for trim and once you've found the plug-in just install it and then go across to the settings and you'll see this brings us to the scheduler settings on the settings page of the unread GUI but now there's an additional schedule for trim at the bottom I set mine to daily so then just apply the settings and click on to done right ok so now we're getting to the fun stuff what we're going to do is install my favorite tweaks plug-in which well lives up to its name tips and tweaks ok so just do a search for tips and install the plug-in and then once install go to the settings of the plugin and then if we scroll down you'll see various options here that we can we can use we will keep coming back to this plugin but for the moment you can see here on Intel CPUs that the CPU scaling governor is set for Power Save and the Intel turbo booster set for none so in my opinion this is one of the best tweaks you can do is actually changing this but before we do let's just run a test on one of the VMS and see what path Knoxville we get with this set how it is right ok so first this test is going to be done on my main server which is a xeon 2690 and i've assigned for hyper-threaded calls to this VN and so the basic school we're getting is seven thousand nine hundred and forty okay so let's do another test but this time we'll change the cpu scaling governor to performance okay so now we're getting eight thousand and forty so that's a hundred points increase right so now what we'll do is we'll set the Intel enable turbo boost to yes and now you can see why I love this plug-in so much because it's bump my performance up over a thousand points to nine thousand sixty five and you can see also that the original single core speed was 1618 and now it's 1699 okay so that's like a great speed increase so let's run just the same test again but this time on a on a quad-core CPU using these 6700 I won't run through all of the tests I'll just show you the results okay so again a good increase on these 6700 a seven and a half percent increase the CPU mark on with the M is actually a little better than the average pass mark score for that CPU so what if you have an AMD CPU well unfortunately at present I don't actually have an AMD test platform but I am saving to build a rising server now that unraised 6.4 has a linux kernel that supports rising so I'll be posting a video when I come to build that server so for this video as unable to do any AMD test but looking at some results online that people have done on testing CPU governor with Linux and risin the results look promising so please if you have an AMD CPU and you change your governor then please post in a comment below to let other users know your experience so those are some things you can try to get more performance out of the server the cpu performance increases especially will be good for both VMS and docker containers now before we move on to more tweaks from here we have to look at the server as a whole now especially when it comes to running both VMs and docker containers together so in part two amongst other things we'll tune our docker containers pinning them whilst keeping VMs and other processes in mind if you like this video then please hit like if you like the channel then please subscribe and I'll catch you in the next part

Channel: Spaceinvader One

Views: 73,757

Keywords: unraid, unraid tutorial, server performance, tweaks, tips, tips and tweaks, unraid performance, docker tuning, vm tuning, kvm tuning, kvm performance, Advanced Server Tuning in unRAID - Get Maximum Performance Pt 1, tutorial, guide, how to, linux, qemu, docker container, cou pinning, emulatorpin, home server, nas

Id: z9Yevb-U3zI

Length: 10min 18sec (618 seconds)

Published: Sat Jul 08 2017

Reddit Comments

[u/spaceinvaderone]

This video is the first in a series of three about tuning your server for maximum performance. The videos cover everything from basic server tuning to Docker container tuning and virtual machine tuning. Some of the topics covered are Planning resource distribution on the server Boosting CPU performance boosting disk performance CPU pinning of Docker container CPU pinning of virtual machines isolating cores pinning emulation functions reducing latency and other things Hope you like it

[u/Audiman64]

Great vids. Thanks for sharing.

[u/likeabaws69]

Awesome

[u/forgetfulcoder]

Have you made any videos about doing AMD GPU pass through with only 1 GPU available (that is unRAID has no GPU to use)?

[u/Springtimefist78]

Is there any chance you could explain how to use the scheduler to turn off turbo write during the night? I am a complete Linux noob and while I can easily follow along and do as I am told I am just not understanding what I need to do to get this to work. I assume I set Schedule Enabled to Yes, Enable or Disable Turbo Write to Disable, What do I put in Cron time to run? And what would I set the Duration for? Thank you for all of your great videos and your support for the Unraid community!