NSA310 + kirkwood 6.5.7 improve net performance (2 replies)

Hello Everyone,
End of last year, I tried to revive a NSA310 NAS by debianizing it. Thanks to bodhi, and the howtos on this forum, I managed to get it funcionally working with "Debian-6.5.7-kirkwood-tld-1-rootfs-bodhi.tar.bz2".

root@debian:~# uname -a
Linux debian 6.5.7-kirkwood-tld-1 #2 PREEMPT Wed Oct 18 21:14:11 PDT 2023 armv5tel GNU/Linux

The only thing that seems a little off, is the performance.

I have put rootfs to the first partition of a WDC WD30EZRX-22D8PB0 3Tb HDD, no other partitions are created yet.

root@debian:~# cat /etc/fstab
# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# <file system> <mount point>   <type>  <options>       <dump>  <pass>
LABEL=rootfs    /               ext3    noatime,nodiratime,errors=remount-ro 0 1
tmpfs          /tmp            tmpfs   defaults          0       0
/swapfile1      swap            swap    defaults        0       0

When I tried to download e.g. with wget or a well seeded torrent with aria2c, I see at max 4-5 MB/s with the wget and 5-6 MB/s with aria2, while consuming 100% cpu usage. On the same cable, my laptop can wget the same file with 9-9,5MB/s.
Also when copying something from the NAS, e.g. with pscp from my laptop (no services are installed on the NAS), I get around 3-4MB/s, while the NAS CPU works 100% (sshd+sftp)

Basic HDD test shows OKish speeds

root@debian:~# dd if=/dev/zero of=tempfile bs=1M count=1024 conv=fdatasync
1024+0 records in
1024+0 records out
1073741824 bytes (1.1 GB, 1.0 GiB) copied, 29.0459 s, 37.0 MB/s

and

root@debian:~# hdparm -tT /dev/sda
/dev/sda:
 Timing cached reads:   474 MB in  2.00 seconds = 236.53 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 312 MB in  3.02 seconds = 103.36 MB/sec

Iperf test is close to the capabilities of the 100Mbps (dont judge) house network to the laptop (*.121)

------------------------------------------------------------
Client connecting to 192.168.1.121, TCP port 5001
TCP window size: 16.0 KByte (default)
------------------------------------------------------------
[  1] local 192.168.1.157 port 50500 connected with 192.168.1.121 port 5001 (icwnd/mss/irtt=14/1448/257)
[ ID] Interval       Transfer     Bandwidth
[  1] 0.0000-10.0330 sec   105 MBytes  88.1 Mbits/sec
root@debian:~#

The CPU seems to be going at full speed

root@debian:~# inxi -c
CPU: single core Feroceon 88FR131 v5l (-UP-) speed/min/max: 1200/400/1200 MHz
Kernel: 6.5.7-kirkwood-tld-1 armv5tel Up: 34m Mem: 53.2/233.4 MiB (22.8%)
Storage: 2.73 TiB (0.1% used) Procs: 72 Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.26

After googling and looking at the forum wiki Performance links, I have tried:
- plugging in to the ISP router directly -> no change
- ext2, ext3, ext4 as filesystems to download to -> no change
- turn off flow control with "ethtool -A eth0 rx off tx off", which was on after install => no change
- I found strace utility, which showed the following, but I dont know what to conclude

root@debian:~# strace -c wget https://cdimage.debian.org/debian-cd/current/armel/iso-cd/debian-12.5.0-armel-netinst.iso
...
% time     seconds  usecs/call     calls    errors syscall
------ ----------- ----------- --------- --------- --------------------
 53.61   15.764566         122    128966           write
 27.75    8.159941          64    126653        59 recv
 11.15    3.277733          17    189756           fcntl64
  7.12    2.093075          16    126605           clock_gettime64
  0.17    0.048873          19      2475           ioctl
  0.13    0.038816          15      2467           getpgrp
  0.02    0.004578          70        65           pselect6
  0.01    0.003214          65        49           mmap2
  0.01    0.003190          88        36           read

Is there a way to improve the situation?

Best regards,
Peter