Weird Lag Issue in UE5 when Creating Projects on a Network File Share Hosted on Unraid

Development Getting Started & Setup
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1

I’m a school teacher / Tech Admin who’s teaching a video game design class. We have a large network file share hosted on Unraid 6.10.3 that is joined to an AD and mapped as a network drive on the student’s PCs.

When we create a new project (of any kind) on the Network drive it takes forever to create. At times it will take up to 15min or more for the engine to create & load the project. We have pretty decent spec PCs and this hasn’t been an issue until we switched to Unraid for the file share source.

I was able to replicate this at my home on a PC with a Ryzen 9 5950x and a 10G connection directly to my personal Unraid server. Same issue albeit a bit faster but still takes forever to create the project and load the editor.

I later created a Windows Server 2022 VM on the Unraid server and re-created the network drive there instead and mapped it to the students profiles just as before and fixed. No crazy lag when creating the project files. Same Unraid server except the share is running through a Windows VM instead.

So I’m not sure if this is an Unraid specific issue or an Unreal 5 issue with using network drives on an Unraid(Linux) network share. Just figured I would post here and see what theories/ideas ya’ll might have? Any help would be much appreciated!

2

Are you running any other VMs on your UNRAID server?

Ive seen issues like documented here where if VMs are running, they cause slow performance on the bridged NIC. Was the Windows 2022 VM you tested bridged to the internal NIC or the bridged nic?

3

I didn’t have any VMs setup until I did the test with the Server 2022 OS. I did have a couple small dockers running, I tested with them running and not running and it didn’t make a difference. Its set up as br0 for the interface. For the VM and for the Unraid Server it self.