Thunderbolt Networking: Very Poor Performance with Sustained Usage
OWC offers high quality Thunderbolt cables in red/green/blue/black colors from 0.5 to 3.0 meters, as well as Thunderbolt optical cables from 10.0 to 30.0 meters in length.
MPG has been using Thunderbolt networking for opening multi-gigabyte Photoshop files. However, while that has been working to great satisfaction, it is a sporadic usage and does not represent performance under sustained usage.
Further testing shows that Thunderbolt 10-gigabit networking is not ready for prime time; performance drops well below gigabit ethernet speeds after only 10GB or so of transfers. See updated performance results (sustained heavy load).
In a nutshell, Thunderbolt 2 networking on OS X is unsuitable for tasks like uncompressed video editing, because speed drops well below even gigabit ethernet speeds after only 10GB or so of transfers.
It’s a wonder that Apple would enable support for such a fundamentally flawed half-baked implementation. But it is entirely consistent with the Apple Core Rot problems running amok at Apple.
Gigabit ethernet can sustain ~115 MB/sec with large files. Observe that 10-gigabit Thunderbolt 2 networking drops down as low as 85MB/sec very quickly. Just as bad, it exhibits highly variable performance, making it unsuitable for many uses.
diglloydIMAC:DIGLLOYD lloyd$ disktester read-files -b double -i 10 /Volumes/Scratch/TEMP DiskTester 2.2.12 64-bit, diglloydTools 2.2.13, 2016-01-24 19:20 Copyright 2006-2016 DIGLLOYD INC. All Rights Reserved Use of this software requires a license. See https://macperformanceguide.com/Software-License.html OS X 10.11.3, 8 CPU cores, 65536MiB memory 2016-02-04 at 09:06:16469 disktester read-files -b double -i 10 /Volumes/Scratch/TEMP read-files params: Transfer size: 65536 KiB per buffer Iterations: 10 Async double buffers: true Scanning "/Volumes/Scratch/TEMP"...327 327 files in 24 folders. ---------------------------------- Iteration 1 --------------------------------- Reading 327 files totaling 205.1 GiB... IO method: dual asynchronous read buffers each of size 64 MiB # Files Amt Read MiB/sec(all) MiB/sec(1) MiB/sec(10) MiB/sec(30) 8 4.92 GiB 1102 1028 1018 1018 <== over 1000MB/sec, good! 18 9.04 GiB 1031 1001 840 931 18 9.66 GiB 1102 1001 840 931 20 10.17 GiB 521 95.2 334 515 <== down to 95MB/sec! 21 10.68 GiB 461 104 279 450 22 11.2 GiB 401 80.2 225 387 24 11.7 GiB 325 98.0 169 322 25 12.2 GiB 305 94.2 151 299 27 12.8 GiB 274 137 128 271 28 13.3 GiB 267 122 120 262 29 13.8 GiB 255 88.7 98.2 248 31 14.4 GiB 232 99.1 98.0 230 32 14.9 GiB 224 89.0 99.2 221 34 15.6 GiB 215 127 104 179 35 16.1 GiB 211 104 105 169 36 16.6 GiB 208 99.5 105 162 37 17.1 GiB 191 91.5 100 150 38 17.6 GiB 188 84.8 97.2 143 39 18.0 GiB 183 82.5 96.5 137 41 18.6 GiB 176 115 96.7 129 42 19.1 GiB 175 110 98.5 125 43 19.6 GiB 172 85.0 96.2 121 45 20.1 GiB 164 97.6 91.8 113 46 20.8 GiB 164 104 92.2 110 48 21.4 GiB 160 122 95.4 104 48 21.9 GiB 164 122 95.4 104 48 22.4 GiB 168 122 95.4 104 48 22.9 GiB 171 122 95.4 104 48 23.4 GiB 175 122 95.4 104 48 23.9 GiB 179 122 95.4 104 48 24.4 GiB 183 122 95.4 104 ...