Slower internal speeds on my gigabit network than I anticipated

**Zac851** · 01-27-2015

I came across the LAN speed test app tonight and decided to buy it just to see if it would tell me anything that I didn't already know.

I have a NAS that I built running on Linux and serves mainly as my media server for all my devices to connect to and stream movies, TV shows, and music from with a few SMB shares setup to to store misc data too. I have no issues with speed and stream 1080p contact all day long from multiple devices but once I ran a speed test on the server awhile back, I think I should be seeing faster speeds than what I'm getting and was wondering if anyone might have some ideas?

My NAS fills a lot of roles with one of those roles is being a web server. Awhile back, I downloaded and installed a copy of Speedtest mini from www.speedtest.net, and hosted the app on the NAS, so that I could test my internal networks speed but my internal Gigabit network was slower than I thought it would be. I tested it from multiple different clients and the speeds were pretty much the same across all wired devices (500-600Mbps)

Tonight, I purchased LAN speed test to see how it compared to Speedtest mini web app and it was very close to the same speed. See screenshot below which shows the LAN Speed test app, and right below it is the Speedtest Mini results. I figured the speeds would atleast be around 700-800 megabit speeds?

Since I am testing to a shared folder with the LAN Speed app, how much are the speeds affected? All the wired clients are connected to a managed 24 port HP Procurve 2824 switch. Any Ideas on what are some things I could look into to get a little more speed?

Both of these test below were run on a Windows 7 machine Intel Core2Duo CPU E4500 @ 2.20GHz with 2GB RAM and a 160GB SSD and Realtek RTL8168B/8111B Family PCI-E Gigabit Ethernet NIC
LAN Speed Test - 583Mbps/561Mbps
Speedtest Mini - 566Mbps/575Mbps

The screenshot below is the specs of my NAS.

**Zac851** · 01-27-2015

I should also add, that I ran a test from my mac to the NAS as well and received nearly identical results as the windows box.

It's a Macbook Pro with a 2Ghz i7 Processor, 16GB RAM, and 120GB SSD so I guess that leaves it being the media server itself, or my HP Procurve switch config correct?

I just thought about it, but I suppose one way I could rule out the NAS is by running a test from one of my wired windows desktops to another wired windows machine and see if it gets any better or worse. If it gets better, then I know it's the NAS since I'll be bypassing it and if it stays the same, then that will point to the switch.

**Scott DeLeeuw** · 01-27-2015

500-600MBps isn't bad. It's not the ultimate, but it's not bad. I would guess the bottleneck is your NAS. Even so, that speed is relatively good.

**Scott DeLeeuw** · 01-27-2015

My results are here, not much different than yours. http://www.homenetworkenabled.com/co...-really-expect

**Zac851** · 01-28-2015

Yeah, I guess I just thought it would have been a little higher number wise but regardless, I have no complaints with speed.

I don't know how much if any this would affect it but the server is also my DNS and DHCP server too.

Today, I decided to see if shutting down my media services would help any. I shut down the Plex Server (has 4 devices that stream from it) as well as any web server related services that runs SABnzbd, Sickbeard, and Couchpotato and ran it again and got 675/605. The is probably about as good as it's going to get.

**Zac851** · 01-28-2015

Also, forgot to ask but do you think it would be beneficial if I enabled jumbo frames on the Procurve switch?

**Scott DeLeeuw** · 01-29-2015

You could always experiment with jumbo frames, but odds are you won't see much improvement with them. You'd also want to segment your network for clients that can and can not utilize jumbo frames. If performance seems good, I wouldn't mess with it.

**Zac851** · 01-29-2015

I've had mixed results enabling them in enterprise environment's and I would like to create a few VLAN's and segment some of my network traffic out but I've never done it on a little home network like mine. Like you said though, I didn't think it would do any good but I came across this article and the guy said he gained a 20% increase on file transfers. I may try it soon. I've got a lot of things on the list that I want to eventually do.

Any how, for now, I've been messing around with my wireless and working with what I've already got and I nearly tripled the speeds so far. I'll post the results in a bit.

**Scott DeLeeuw** · 01-29-2015

Originally Posted by Zac851

I've had mixed results enabling them in enterprise environment's and I would like to create a few VLAN's and segment some of my network traffic out but I've never done it on a little home network like mine. Like you said though, I didn't think it would do any good but I came across this article and the guy said he gained a 20% increase on file transfers. I may try it soon. I've got a lot of things on the list that I want to eventually do.

Any how, for now, I've been messing around with my wireless and working with what I've already got and I nearly tripled the speeds so far. I'll post the results in a bit.

Wow, tripling throughput on wireless is great. Looking forward to hearing about that.