Almost two weeks ago, I bought a 6tb MyCloud based on WD’s claim:
Fast backup
My Cloud is on your own network, so backing up is much faster.
Riiiiiiiight. 12 days later, it still had 19.5 gigs left of 1.2tb and seemed to be getting exponentially slower as it progressed. I left it going more out of morbid curiosity than any expectation that it would finish. I did manage to complete backups of a tablet and a couple laptops that had less data and fewer files but it still took a ridiculous amount of time for each of them. Over two days for just over 13 gigs from my tablet. Even over wireless, I average 5-5.5 MB/s. Moving that much data should have taken around an hour.
Something I noticed about SmartWare is that it is doing something that causes the load on the My Cloud device to spike. The more SmartWare interfaces I have open (on multiple machines), the worse it gets. This is what I saw earlier tonight with 4 machines trying to process backup jobs with the SmartWare interface open:
WDMyCloud:~# top
top - 21:04:44 up 4:03, 1 user, load average: 123.72, 126.63, 93.44
Tasks: 192 total, 2 running, 190 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
%Cpu(s): 0.1 us, 20.5 sy, 0.0 ni, 0.0 id, 75.0 wa, 0.0 hi, 4.4 si, 0.0 st
KiB Mem: 232448 total, 186880 used, 45568 free, 2432 buffers
KiB Swap: 500672 total, 177728 used, 322944 free, 1280 cached
I’ve never seen a triple digit load. Ever. Going back nearly a quarter century. It got a bit higher, then the web interface died and the load dropped back to single digits. I still had SSH and SMB access to the My Cloud device but no access thru the browser. I have no idea what the web interface has to do with the SmartWare backup process. The backup process still seemed to be running without the web interface.
The load also spikes any time I use the web interface thru the browser. This leads me to suspect there’s a problem with the apache implementation on the MyCloud device. But that doesn’t explain why the backup software is hitting the web service in the first place.
Another thing I’ve noticed is that SmartWare seems to have 3 gears. Sometimes it’ll go hella-slow. Sometimes it’ll move around 5-10 gigs per hour. Rarely, it’ll move data around 60-70 MB/s. 60-70 MB/s is pretty darn good. That’s about as fast as I’d expect to be able to copy data to a single hard drive over my gigabit network.
This is all running SmartWare 2.4.6 (updated just after I bought the MyCloud device and started this process) and the latest firmware on the MyCloud device. The MyCloud device updated immediately when I fired it up and two more times since then. The current version is - waiting for the web interface to load. Just opening the browser kicked the load up to 23. - The current firmware version is…v04.01.02-417. The previous version was v04.01.01-413. Before that it was v04.something and it came out of the box with v03.something. I didn’t make note of the specific versions during the initial update. I just noticed it went from a major release of “3” to “4”.
After watching SmartWare struggle, I decided to try a third party backup solution. I shouldn’t have to pay additional money to make backups work when I was sold a backup solution but I was curious to see if different software would have the same problem. After installing the software and selecting a folder on the MyCloud device as the target, I clicked “start backup”. It scanned my drive and started moving data. It’s holding around 30 MB/s give or take a little. Estimated time to completion is about 16 hours. Load on the MyCloud device holding between 6 and 8. Which is still pretty darn high but at least it can function.
When I accessed the web interface to get the current firmware version, the load spiked to the low 20s and the backup speed dropped like a stone. As soon as I got the firmware version and closed the browswer window, the load started falling and my data transfer speed picked back up.
So it seems like there are two problems:
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The web service on the MyCloud device is slamming the device’s processor. When it pushes the load too high, data transfers slow dramatically. Access of the device though the web interface can be sufficient to cause this to happen.
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SmartWare is accessing the web interface on the MyCloud device for no obvious reason. SmartWare’s access of the web interface causes the load to spike and the data throughput to drop.
While I’ve been typing and editing this post, the third party software has backed up 4% of my 1.2tb data set.
Edited to add: I suppose the root problem could be the applications called to provide data to the web interface.