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john5788

Member

Registered: 2015-05-10

Posts: 3

Copy to CIFS mounted location slow in Thunar

I have a strange problem that I cannot identify. I have mounted a FreeNAS CIFS share in my network and it seems to work perfectly fine on other machines: Gentoo server (no GUI), Ubuntu HTPC, and even a VM of Windows 8.1 on my main desktop.

However, copying files from my Gentoo desktop to the CIFS share has some problems that only show up while I am using a file manager like Thunar or PCManFM. When copying from the file managers, I get a very low throughput of about 17MB/s to the mounted location under /mnt. Performing a copy of the same file from the command line using `cp` gives me my entire gigabit throughput of ~100MB/s. Why the difference and how to fix this? I am running Thunar 1.6.7

My CIFS mount fstab line:

//freenas/share		/mnt/freenas/share	cifs	credentials=/root/.cifs-john5788,defaults,uid=1000,gid=1000,cache=none 0 0

I'll note that my HTPC with Ubuntu does not have this same problem when copying files using PCManFM.

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,481

Re: Copy to CIFS mounted location slow in Thunar

I'm not sure about pcmanfm, but thunar uses gvfs for file operations. Its quite likely that there is an issue with gvfs. Here is a recent related bug report.

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john5788

Member

Registered: 2015-05-10

Posts: 3

Re: Copy to CIFS mounted location slow in Thunar

I think you are correct. I am trying to copy via gvfs-copy on a command line and I see the same slow throughput when compared to `cp`. A 2.1GB file completes in 1 minute 31s:

$ time gvfs-copy testFile /mnt/freenas/share/temp/

real	1m31.889s
user	0m0.020s
sys	0m5.890s

$ du -hs testFile 
2.1G	testFile

$ gvfs-copy --version
gvfs 1.22.4

Thanks for finally pointing me in the right direction on this

Last edited by john5788 (2015-05-12 15:53:23)

john5788

Member

Registered: 2015-05-10

Posts: 3

Re: Copy to CIFS mounted location slow in Thunar

I did some more testing and it seems like the slowdown might be due to Thunar in some manner. To get the point, if Thunar is viewing my mounted CIFS folder, I get the slow transfer rates. If Thunar is not running then I get the full throughput. I ran this test about 5 times in both cases and it seems very consistent

$ time gvfs-copy Downloads/testFile /mnt/freenas/share/temp/

real	0m19.157s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m1.850s

$ thunar /mnt/freenas/share/temp

$ time gvfs-copy Downloads/testFile /mnt/freenas/share/temp/

real	1m35.421s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m6.100s

$ killall Thunar

$ time gvfs-copy Downloads/testFile /mnt/freenas/share/temp/

real	0m19.139s
user	0m0.000s
sys	0m1.820s

This does not happen if Thunar is not "looking" at the folder. I can confirm this via a GUI copy as well. If I initiate the file transfer and move Thunar to a different location immediately, the transfer completes at full speed. Thunar must be polling the folder for updates or something and causing some extra lag.

Last edited by john5788 (2015-05-12 16:34:13)

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 11,481

Re: Copy to CIFS mounted location slow in Thunar

Perhaps it would be helpful if you added this information to the bug report. The developer might find it useful in helping to isolate the cause.

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hjudt

Member

Registered: 2014-11-27

Posts: 21

Re: Copy to CIFS mounted location slow in Thunar

Yes, this is probably because monitors the folder and will reload file information on any change event, worse if thumbnails are generated in such a case. You could try current git, it could be a little better at that if you use thunar for copying files. There will be no big improvements for files changed outside of thunar, e.g. by the cp command.