[BUGS] Net network performance question?

[Andrew Reilly]

Here's a group that just might have a few clues for me.  Any suggestions gratefully accepted.

I run a FreeBSD system at home as a file server.  Have done since maybe '92 or so, but of course all of the moving parts and bits have changed over time.  Today's version has a new-ish version-1 Ryzen motherboard with 32G RAM (which I've managed to stop spontaneously freezing a couple of times a week, over the break, by locking _all_ P-states off except 0, in BIOS).  That is host to an NVME SSD that holds root, /usr, /var, etc, and four 4T Hitachi drives in RaidZ form for user data.  There are two quota-limited ZFS volumes on there that I use to TimeMachine backup the house's two macOS systems.  Main network file service to the macs is over the latest Samba, with all of the Unix and Mac-friendly tweaks enabled, and that doesn't seem to work too badly.  Not totally fluid (SMB restrictions on file name characters bight every so often, as do slightly weird file permissions) but tolerable, and seemingly the only option really supported by macOS these days.  TimeMachine still runs over AFP, so NetAtalk is on there too.  That box is connected to a switch over gigabit ethernet, as is my mac desktop and a Telstra Netcomm cable-modem-cum-wifi-router.  Hanging off the 5GHz Wifi band at the moment is a brand new MacBook Air, a replacement for my wife's dying old MacBook.  It's on it's first boot, and is attempting to restore from the last backup of the MacBook, some 280G.  It claims that it will take another 36 hours, at the current average pace of 2MB/s.  That seems low to me, by perhaps as much as a factor of 60.  I've read that 5GHz WiFi is supposed to manage 1300 Mb/s under good conditions, and in this case the new laptop is about eight feet from the WiFi router, in line of sight.  Doesn't get much better than that.  Not that there's much I can do about it now, but does anyone have any thoughts about why the restore performance should be so awful?  Could it be bottlenecking on the laptop's APFS write speed?  Something pessimal about NetAtalk over WiFi?  A rubbish network stack in the Telstra modem?  (Heaven knows the user-interface and the firewall are rubbish.  The device drops all IPSec packets silently on the ground.)

Cheers,

Andrew Reilly
E: areilly at bigpond.net.au
M: +61-409-824-272