After a successful release and the fastest adoption of software in TrueNAS history, TrueNAS SCALE 24.04 “Dragonfish” has its first update today. The performance being achieved is significantly beyond TrueNAS 13.0 and Cobia.

Dragonfish is proving to be the best-ever TrueNAS version with significant improvements in the following areas:

Quality has been improved and demonstrated with a tremendously successful RC.1 and Release. There have been a record number of early adopters (32,000) and simultaneously a low number of reported issues. This update resolves all the major known issues with the initial release, including the excessive use of swap space and slow webUI performance.

Security enhancements, such as logging, auditing, restricted admins, and session monitoring have now been deployed by TrueNAS users with success.

Functionality and ease-of-use improvements have been getting positive feedback. The SMB/NFS share wizards, Netdata monitoring, SMB share importing, and Linux Sandboxes are all getting a good workout. Explore the TrueNAS Dragonfish Documentation for the other features.

Performance has been improved in many dimensions; IOPS, bandwidth, caching, metadata handling. Below, we’ll discuss this in more detail.

Fire-Breathing Performance Improvements

Dragonfish benefits from OpenZFS, Linux, SAMBA improvements, and some TrueNAS optimizations. The performance changes may not be obvious for smaller systems, but larger systems need software performance that scales with core and drive count. Dragonfish has significant improvements in IOPS (virtualization and databases), bandwidth (video and backup), and File Metadata (directory listings).

50% more IOPS: IOPS (Input/Outputs Per Second) is a classic storage metric for transactional workloads like virtual desktops and databases. On the same platform and pool configuration (a TrueNAS M50 with 20 SSDs in 4x 5wZ1) we see 50% higher IOPS with Dragonfish when compared to TrueNAS 13.0. This often implies 50% more VMs on a system and a 30% lower storage cost. As indicated in the chart below, Dragonfish uncorks the cache bottleneck present in  Cobia and improves majorly on 13.0 performance.

1000% faster File Metadata: Metadata performance is critical for applications that deposit thousands of files in a single directory, like some more automated scientific and manufacturing workloads, for example. Writing and reading the files can be fine, but listing the contents of a 100,000 file directory could take many minutes. With Dragonfish, a directory can have 10X more files than TrueNAS 13.0 or 23.10, but maintain the same performance for directory listings. For example, a million files in a directory can now be listed in as few as 15 seconds. Operating systems that access additional metadata in an inefficient manner (such as MacOS) may continue to experience slow directory listing times, due to the additional overhead of these clients.

WebUI performance was reported to be occasionally slow in 24.04 due to a change to Linux Kernel 6.6 swap algorithms. Thanks to prompt and helpful feedback from the early adopters of Dragonfish, iXsystems was able to track down the root of the problem and make the necessary adjustments. Swap has been disabled by default in this update, and the algorithms are configured better for situations where swap is enabled.

Evolution of TrueNAS

TrueNAS SCALE Dragonfish is expected to become the most commonly used software version during Q3 of 2024. Already, it is in 3rd position behind CORE 13.0 and SCALE 23.10.

Given the quality, security, performance, and Apps improvements, iX recommends that new TrueNAS users start with TrueNAS SCALE 24.04.1, and we will begin shipping SCALE as the default install on our TrueNAS Mini products in the near future.

Existing TrueNAS CORE users are welcome to stay on 13.0 or update to the new 13.3 version when it is released later in 2024. CORE users can choose to sidegrade to SCALE at any time if desired, but support for TrueNAS CORE will continue unchanged.

Join the Growing SCALE Community

With the release of TrueNAS SCALE 24.04, there’s never been a better time to join the growing TrueNAS community. Download the SCALE 24.04 installer or upgrade from within the TrueNAS web UI today, and experience True Data Freedom for yourself. Then, make sure you’ve signed up for the newly relaunched TrueNAS Community Forums to share your experience.