Low bandwidth utilization

Node Operators troubleshooting
1

Hello!

I would like to ask for some guidance on how to make my node perform better.
I have been running the node for 22 months on an optical line with 1gbit/350mbit down/up bandwidth.
Initially, a dedicated Windows machine received the storage via iscsi from a synology nas, now a month ago I moved it to the nas under the docker container and store the shared content natively.
Synology has two Exos X16 16TB disks in shr raid for 2x512 Enterprise SSD R/W (Intel s4610) cache. I know a single disk is enough, but this was already an existing setup.
There is no IO waiting, the upload and download error rate is around 0.5% in the evaluation of the storagenode log.
While browsing grafana, I see that the average utilization is 2mbps or less in both directions. I don’t understand why the usage is so weak. During the neighbor check, there is only me or a maximum of 2 nodes on my subnet. The service provider assigns a new IP address (pppoe) every week, which is why the neighbors may change.
Could you give me advice on how I could improve the utilization of my node?

Thanks

2

The usage depends only on customers’ usage, not hardware.
The location plays some role, but not so much.

From the hardware perspective:

  • do not use SMR
  • do not use network attached storage (unless you run the node on this NAS), NFS, SMB, etc. are not supported, only iSCSI can work
  • It’s better to do not use USB drives and use internal drives if it’s possible
  • do not use BTRFS
  • do not use exFAT

That’s probably all. And of course RAID only for Storj makes no sense at all, unless you have it already.
See RAID vs No RAID choice

3

Roughly what I observe as well. Your setup is likely good enough.

Storj is not popular enough yet to require more bandwidth from nodes.

4

Thanks, currently synology shr mirror, btrfs is running.
Maybe then I’ll buy a big air one and break the raid, format one to ext4 basic and move to it.

5

Not needed. If you use Synology, they optimized btrfs to work normally. The external HDD could be SMR, so be careful.