Network topology advice welcomed - patchy performance

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richmac

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Jun 15, 2014
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Thanks for looking at this - would appreciate any advice.

Here's what's in place...
Renovated house a few years ago so have Cat6 cabling throughout, all running to the loft
120Mb Cable Broadband - using Virgin Media Superhub in Modem Mode
Router is an Apple Airport Extreme (Dual Band) - latest firmware
3 x Apple Airport Express - hard wired, used as Airplay receivers
3 x Apple TVs 2 - hard wired
Synology NAS DS211 with latest firmware
Variety of equipment connected to the network (wired iMac, Smart TV, TiVo etc and wifi phones etc).

In the loft, the Airport Extreme connects to 2 x TP-Link SG1024d unmanaged switches (one cable to each switch from the router). The switches then run to the cabled outlets in each room.

Hoped this would be fast and relatively future proof, but not proving to be the case. Download speeds from the internet / speed tests all ok, but internal traffic from the Synology NAS can be incredibly slow on some devices.

Can stream ok to a DLNA TV, but struggles to stream to the Apple TVs - buffering for significant amounts of time or error messages. Everything's set to factory defaults.

Followed a lot of advice online, tried messing with Jumbo Frames, and now thinking whether upgrading to a managed switch would help. Or whether there's something in the way I've configured the network that's causing me problems. Not experienced enough to know where to look for packet loss / ports etc.

Would welcome any tips re where to start?

Rich
 
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You should not even be able to put a dent in the capacity of those switches. They are full wirespeed switches that can pass traffic at full rate in and out on every port at the same time.

It really should not even matter how you have it cabled since you likely will not exceed 1g of bandwidth.

You of course want to try simple stuff like test with the nas on the same switch as the end devices. You could also plug the 2 switches directly together and only uplink one to the router. This would prevent the traffic from passing through the airport but it should not matter the lan ports are just a switch anyway and should cause no delays on the traffic.

IPERF is a simple line mode tool that works well to test lan throughput without...
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bill001g

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Aug 9, 2012
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You should not even be able to put a dent in the capacity of those switches. They are full wirespeed switches that can pass traffic at full rate in and out on every port at the same time.

It really should not even matter how you have it cabled since you likely will not exceed 1g of bandwidth.

You of course want to try simple stuff like test with the nas on the same switch as the end devices. You could also plug the 2 switches directly together and only uplink one to the router. This would prevent the traffic from passing through the airport but it should not matter the lan ports are just a switch anyway and should cause no delays on the traffic.

IPERF is a simple line mode tool that works well to test lan throughput without being impacted by disk or video or whatever. Unfortunately it won't run on the NAS.

Pretty much what you are trying to first do is eliminate the issue being cable or some hardware like the router or switch. You would want to put a PC on the NAS devices cable since you can't really test the nas.

If you do not find something easy like a bad termination on a cable then you are in the application area. If something simple like iperf can transfer data quickly but nas can not then you may want to post a different question to a storage forum and see if there are tuning options.

I would turn jumbo frames off until you get stuff working you should easily get 400mbit/sec and many times much more without jumbo frames. Many times you can get up near 900mbit without jumbo frames. Managed switches will not buy you much you do not need the extra features like vlan support or traffic filtering etc. The only benefit they give is you can see if you are getting errors on any ports which generally means bad cables or misonfigured end devices.
 
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