Enabling Jumbo Frames makes 10Gbe a bit slower

This is quite normal, there is no guarantee, that enabling jumbo frames, will make traffic faster.

You may want to experiment, with the size you have defined, e.g. try an MTU of 4000 or 8000, rather than 9014.

Jumbo Frames are frames which are larger than 1500.

Also you may find that the bottle neck could be elsewhere, or you are not full optimizing the link.

Normally, the only way jumbo frame could slow transfer speed is if the error rate on the link is high.
That said, File copy is a rather high level test, you should test link speed with a dedicated utility to see if the problem is effectively at the network stack or elsewhere.

Ping is not a good performance indicator for transfer speed.

I get as high as 9.3 Gbps without Jumbo Frames enabled but I only get about 7.1 Gbps WITH Jumbo Frames enabled.

How are you determining this speed?

File copy and performance tab of task manager.

and also it depends on the physical switch, in a recent conversation with Dell Networking, they advised us, that MTU size, should match the recommended figure designed for the Dell physical switch.

In this case with Dell, they suggested a figure of 9018! was the magic MTU for this Dell switch.

on an empty 5.5 TB Raid 6 Array as the SMB 3.0 destination for the file transfer..

I copy one folder with 21.2 GB (64 Files, 5 Folders) I get anywhere between 9 Gbps to 4 Gbps.
if I copy the same folder (renamed) I get slower speeds

If I copy one 22 GB file it is fairly high 9 GB to a quick dip to 3.8 GB
If I copy it (renamed) it is consistently slower at  9 GB but mainly 7 GB rates.

With such a huge array.. why does the file transfer rate decrease when I add files?  We are only talking 22 GB out of 5.5 TB.

Is Task Manager's performance tab not reliable?

I used LANBench which has both Client & Server... Worked well! thank you!

So what was the outcome ?

All working well ? No problems  with jumbo frames ?

Has the performance degradation been a red herring? It would also be interessing if you changed the MTU, and what the rates are with and without Jumbo frames, just for the files.

I am realizing that I had the connections for the test set to more than one.. When I just use 1 connection it is a steady 6Gbps.  arggh