Performance boost on my HP Microserver N40L after Debian 12 upgrade

Written by Claudio Kuenzler - 0 comments

Published on February 12th 2025 - Listed in Hardware Linux Samba

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Got a nice surprise last weekend, when I upgraded the OS on my (meanwhile pretty old) HP Microserver N40L.

I've been using this small HP server since 2012 as my local NAS. The server is still running, disks have been replaced with larger capacities over the years. Although the embedded (SOC) CPU doesn't offer much power, it's still enough to run a Samba server on it.

The OS itself still boots from a USB pen drive. The four physical 3.5 inch hard drives are used in two RAID-1 arrays spanning in a LVM Logical Volume, used for the Samba Shares.

Some stalling file transfers in Debian 11

This server previously ran on Debian 11 (Bullseye). Everything worked, Samba performed pretty OK. However I noticed that from time to time the disk access seemed to "pause" or "stall" when I wanted to transfer larger files (larger than 2 GB).

In such situations, the copy/transfer progress bar on my Linux Mint then stalled for a couple of seconds. The data transmission rate dropped from the expected ~60MB/sec to around 2MB/sec. I'm pretty sure that the average just dropped, and during that moment there was no data transfer at all.

I was pretty sure I could rule out Samba as the cause, because I could hear the physical disks spinning and doing a lot of noise in such a situation.

As it happened from time to time - usually during the first large file transfer after a recent boot - and then recovered, I didn't bother too much. At the end, the NAS is used for backups and as media library, nothing urgent or needed at a very high transfer rate.

Performance boost after upgrade to Debian 12

Shortly after I upgraded this server to Debian 12 (Bookworm), I noticed a significant performance boost whenever I transferred data (small and large files) to the Samba shares. 

I did not run into any stalled transfers anymore, the data transfer rate remained at a steady 60-70 MB/sec.

There could be a couple of reasons for this improved performance:

• ext4 file system performance improvements (Kernel 5.10 to 6.1)
  
• improvements on hardware drivers (Bookworm now contains non-free-firmware)
  
• improvements on USB (drives) access (Kernel)
  
• Samba improvements (Samba 4.13 to 4.17)
  

Anyway, it's really nice to see that my NAS now performs better than ever! Because I honestly did not expect a major improvement with the OS upgrade, I unfortunately didn't perform performance tests prior and after the distribution upgrade.

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