Network and firewall slowing Nuendo down

Nuendo
1

Hi, just wondering if anyone else has had a similar issue.

We usually run all our projects from a server, this is a Synolagy raid setup and the network and DAWs are window based. We’re struggling a lot with lag and slow response in the projects and this seems to come from some Window based firewall/network setup.

The problem is we can’t get around it, no matter what different settings where you allow certain programs or disks to skip the firewall or virus check it doesn’t go away. The only thing that helps is to switch everything off. And this is a workaround for sure, but you have to manually do it every day and it isn’t very safe of course…

The lag doesn’t affect playback that much, it’s more everytime you move a clip, or zoom, or edit, or change volume… This I suspect is because it’s reading the image files everytime and , as we know, they’re not exactly huge .

Any tips or hints are appreciated :smiley:

2

I’m definitely not a ‘network guy’, but is it possible to create a physical subnet and place the / a hardware firewall outside of it? Sort of allow traffic freely within but place the wall outside?

3

Me neither… we have like a physical switch that also acts as firewall to the outside world, so this is just local windows firewall making the trouble. But if you turn it off it turns on again automatically after 24 hrs

4

Do you have a 10.000 LAN?
We have digitization and restoration projects that we all record tapes / vinyl … on a server Synology NAS. We then copy all projects to a local SSD hard drive first, simply because the hard drive speed is 5 times faster then network. In addition, each edit creates temporary files in the edit folder, with the network again being five times slower.
However, we have permanently switched off the firewall in Windows. Every time you start your computer, you get a message that you can dismiss (Windows 11 Pro).
We only work from the NAS in emergencies, because it’s simply far too slow for large projects. Unless you have SSDs in the NAS and a 10.000 LAN.
But the firewall can be switched off permanently.

5

Hi, thanks. Our network is 1 GB LAN and the discs are not SSD… :slightly_frowning_face:

So there’s basically a physical limit doing this? I’ll look into turning things off permanently

6

With the best of intentions, only speeds of 100 MB/s are possible, while the internal SSD achieves 550 MB/s. Apart from that, a network never has the ability to address a hard disk as directly as the operating system.

7

Since you inspired me to look into turning off permanently, I had the idea of making in extension for .peak and .wav files. Not gonna conclude just after 10 mins but it seems to have made a difference.

8

Is this solved now?

9

No! He he…

Still have to turn everything off for larger projects.

10

So if you want to disable the firewall permanently, you should be able to do it by following this guide if disabled in the control panel it should stay off. We’ve had to do that on rare occasion with systems at work.

If you want to place a hardware firewall outside your devices to then keep them safe, you can do that, depending on your network setup and needs. I’d need to know more about your setup to make any recommendations.

However others are correct: You have an issue in that throughput just isn’t going to be that good. 1 gig ethernet caps out at 125MB/sec absolute max and when you take overhead into account 100MB/sec is about the best you ever see. SATA SSDs can pull 550MB/sec, nVME SSDs can pull as much as 7500MB/sec.

That aside, NICs have pretty high ISR overhead, which can interfere with realtime audio.

The best solution is to do something where you edit the data locally and then sync it to a network server. You can do that manually, or you can get software to do nightly syncs when you are not using the systems.

If you insist on doing it directly off a network file server, then you need to upgrade your gear to work better with that. What you’ll want is several things:

  1. A file server with SSDs, and good caching. Since you are going to be doing not just random access, but multi-client random access you are going to want something solid that can handle that. Just how solid depends on how hard you are hitting it, I’d have to know more to make a specific recommendation. In general I’m going to recommend a NetApp AFF but I can say with certainty you aren’t going to get one because of the cost (6 figures). A good server running Windows is probably a more economical choice but still expensive.

  2. A server that supports SMB 3 and SMB Multichannel. A Windows server will do so, NetApp can too. Ideally, you’d want SMB Direct (RDMA) as well, that is pretty much Windows server only.

  3. 10 or 25gig server NICs that support RMDA and other offloads, including in your client computers. I recommend Intel E810-XXVDA2 adapters, they’ll do 25gig and everything you need. These are not just for the speed, but for the features.

  4. A network that supports iWARP, which is RDMA over TCP. You need a switch that can handle the flow control settings and such. In theory it might work fine over an unmanaged 10gig switch, but I’ve never tried it and I’d want to have a managed switch that is properly configured for it.

Do all that, and you can get near native performance from network storage. There is still some overhead, but much, much less. However it can be costly, and complex. SMB Multichannel has some complexity to setting it up, SMB Direct has even more.

One thing you can try right now is go to your Synology, and see if it supports SMB 3, and if it does, turn it on if it isn’t. A lot of NAS devices default to SMB 2, or 1, and those don’t perform as well.

11

Hi, thanks very much, I will pass this on to our IT. :slight_smile:

12

Hi, IT out of office :slight_smile:

13

If you, or they, have more questions or want more help let me know. For me, this is the hobby part, IT, particularly enterprise Windows IT, is my profession.

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