I have been running Xpenology on a home-built system for about two years now.
I am using a Gigabyte J3455 motherboard with 16 GB RAM and 4 hard disks.
The Intel J3455 is a quad core processor without hyperthreading. The hardware
is similar to a Synology DS918+.
I am running DSM 6.2.3 bare metal, using DS918+ software with Jun's bootlader 1.04b.
The system has been running reliably for two years now, except for one
thing: booting is unreliable and slow. Sometimes the system doesn't boot at
all and needs to be restarted. Sometimes it boots but there is no network connection.
When it boots OK, it takes about 7 minutes before the system is online.
Last week I tried to reduce the power consumption of the system by disabling
processor cores via the BIOS. Much to my surprise, the system boots reliably
with just one core active, and also boots much faster: about 2 minutes instead of 7 minutes.
The web interface also seems more responsive with just one core enabled.
I have tried different settings with 1 to 4 cores enabled, and the system boots
much slower as the number of active cores increases. Also the boot problems get
worse as the number of active cores increases.
File transfers are also a bit faster using one core only: 114 MB/sec read/write (1 core)
and 101 MB/sec read/write with 4 cores enabled. The CPU load with 1 core is nearly 100%
during these transfers, and far less with 4 cores.
Pretty weird, huh?
Any thoughts?