Increase RAID Rebuild / rsync Performance for QNAP NAS

QNAP has limited the amount of resources dedicated to their NAS lineup when rebuilding a RAID array or performing rsync backups.  The decision here was to limit the amount of impact these types of processes have on your system in order to maintain an acceptable level of responsiveness.  This is very considerate of QNAP, however, I prefer a bit more control over my system and would like these processes to complete faster; well-knowing I will be sacrificing system responsiveness.

If you are interested in modifying your NAS to grant more resources to these process, then knowing what your current settings are can give you insight into what changes you should make.

NOTE: Editing the configuration files incorrectly can cause serious, system-wide problems. QNAP nor computingondemand.com cannot guarantee that any problems resulting from the use of configuration file editing can be solved. Back up your information first, but use at your own risk.

• Under Network Services, make sure Allow SSH connection is checked.

Open an SSH connection to your NAS.  I prefer putty for my SSH client, but your mileage may vary.

1. Open putty and type the IP address of your NAS in the Host Name (or IP address field)
2. Click Open
3. Login to your NAS with your admin username and password (default username: admin | default password: admin)

To see what your current settings are, use the following commands

Maximum speed:
cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_max
Minimum speed:
cat /proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min

The results returned will be KB/s.  For my purposes the following results were returned:

To increase either of these settings you can use the following example:

echo 50000 >/proc/sys/dev/raid/speed_limit_min

This change will take immediate effect.  This value may not be suitable for your system and will require some testing.  Once you find the value that will work for you, you will need to edit your autorun.sh to make the changes permanent.

You can find the instructions for creating or modifying your autorun.sh directly on the QNAP Wiki Page.