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  • As mentioned in the blog post's footnote, the bottleneck may just be on the NAS side:

    > this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores). I was testing writing to an array of fast enterprise NVMe SSDs, so they shouldn't be the bottleneck here.

    He was only getting 1 Gigabyte of throughput out of the built in 10 Gigabit Ethernet connection and moving to the 25 Gigabit connection only made a marginal impact on throughput, after all.

    by GeekyBear
  • Dang, here I was feeling slick with 10Gb between my MBP and Mac mini and NAS. That’s the thing, it could always be bigger / faster / more. It’s enough for my workflow, but it’s fun to see people push further.
    by alsetmusic
  • It’s crazy that the Ethernet chips consume more power (presumably - because of the heat) than the processor in the computer. How is driving 25Gb/s such a hot task compared to driving multiple 40Gb/s Thunderbolt ports?
    by teaearlgraycold
  • One of the YouTube comments pointed out the issue is most likely the lack of support for SMB Direct (RDMA) in macOS. Would be nice to repeat the test on a Windows/Linux laptop.
    by pzmarzly
  • I’m in the process of gradually upgrading an in-house video production studio with <10 seats from 10G to 25/100G. There were attempts to do this years ago, and I found some unused Atto 40G Thunderlink adapters and Sonnet’s 25G adapters. The 40G Attos are EOL, and I couldn’t get the Sonnets to work. The SFP jungle/support/information is really maddening.

    Atto’s new 100G Thunderlinks work well. I’ve seen speeds of just over 5 gigabytes per second. Atto definitely does a lot of kernel extension wizardry to get macOS to achieve these speeds.

    A bit OT: I hope Blackmagic really shakes up the 100G connectivity market, and that Apple realizes their platform is extremely well-suited for IP Video 2110 workflows — if they can ever get networking under control.

    by ccssowa
  • He mentions this in the footnote:

    > I have SMB multichannel enabled, but this real-world speed limitation could also be related to my use of my lower-power Arm NAS (running on Ampere Altra, with 32 fairly-slow CPU cores).

    Based on my own testing with a 25 Gb NIC setup on macOS I strongly suspect the issue is not on the NAS side, and the hardware I was working with is by no means underpowered.

    The Mac I was working with is one of those rack mount M2 Mac Pros with a 25 Gb PCI-e card. On the NAS side it was a several hundred terabyte all NVMe flash multi-node cluster, each node with Xeon CPUs and 2x 25 Gb bonded NICs. Doing some rough throughput testing from macOS over multi-channel SMB yields throughput rates that are barely faster than the built-in 10 Gb copper NICs on the Mac.

    Using iperf I can confirm that I can get near enough to 25 Gb/s raw network throughput on the Mac. And other non-macOS systems see significantly faster throughput to the same NAS. I am not sure exactly what the issue is that causes 25 Gb NICs to underperform so significantly for file sharing tasks, but I am reasonably certain that the issue is in macOS.

    by PhageGenerator
  • Can't you just put a real PCIe NIC in an eGPU enclosure with a fan? I bet you can solve this problem for like $150 and two craigslist transactions.
    by randusername
  • I'm using the sonnet at work. Work paid for it. Yes it's more expensive. I have gotten over 25 gbps bidirectional, but not by much. Maybe 27. A big downside is that it only supports 15W upstream power which I didn't think to check, so since that laptop only has 2 usb-c ports for power input, it's a bit limiting.

    The upside, though, was that I plugged it in, got my throughput, and never had to worry ever again. Remember that engineering time is mucho $$. So troubleshooting overheating, divising a solution, manufacturing it, etc, that all eats into the savings.

    The $400 dock would be cool though. It seems smaller than the sonnet and fixes my charging problem. Weirdly I didn't think I'd care about not including transceivers but they did actually come in handy, so that is a downside. Might try to get one of these if I need another one in the future.

    by Neywiny

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