1

I have my home wired with CAT 5e (which I understand can support gigabit ethernet) connected using the ubiquiti devices (1 UniFi Security Gateway 3P, 1 network switch 8-60W and 2 access points - UniFi AP-AC-In Wall).

My synology NAS is connected on one of the access points and my computers are connected to the switch and sometimes the wifi.

Still when I try to move large files (or large amounts of files) between the computer and the NAS the network speed is quite slow.

How can I test the network speed locally to understand where the bottleneck is?

Pablo
  • 133
  • 7
  • Connect a laptop to the NAS on the same switch segment as the NAS by Ethernet. You may need to set a static IP to the switch. What speed do you get? Then add one of your network elements and test again. Do this until you find the slowdown. – John Sep 16 '20 at 19:27
  • Thanks for the comment @John. Maybe I wasn't quite clear, I am after what terminal commands I could use to performance test the network when I do what you suggested. – Pablo Sep 16 '20 at 19:33
  • Most NIC adapters include speed test (bytes per second). I use DU Meter and that it very good as well. – John Sep 16 '20 at 19:48
  • A gold-standard tool for isolating network performance is https://iperf.fr/iperf-download.php – davidgo Sep 16 '20 at 19:54
  • Does this answer your question? [Test the Speed of a Local Area Network](https://superuser.com/questions/101783/test-the-speed-of-a-local-area-network) – pkamb Sep 16 '20 at 20:56

1 Answers1

0

If you want to test pure network speed, iperf is the tool to have (https://iperf.fr/iperf-download.php). But you have to install on both machine testing the link (client/server). I've seen a couple of ways to get this running on synology, one beeing to run a docker container with iperf (https://hub.docker.com/r/networkstatic/iperf3). Ideally always test with a wired connection to limit factors (wifi interference).

Here is a few steps i would do in order to find the problem and test network speed:

First, make sure that the links between your NAS and network is correctly beeing displayed as gigabit and that your cable are OK.

Then i would try to transfer files using another protocol. You didn't mention it but i'm guessing you are using SMB to transfer files, which is not the fastest transfer protocol out there. Sometimes Synology NAS are using conservative config like suporting SMBv1 and SMBv2 which are slower. Try to use FTP for example, which is usually faster. If it's faster using FTP, you can then try different SMB configuration to get the speed you should be getting.

Make sure your drive are OK in your NAS. Faulted drive in a RAID array can cause performance issue while still beeing functionnal.

Like @John mentionned, you can always connect to the box directly by using static ip, bypassing your whole network to make sure that's not the problem.

NMC
  • 111
  • 4