Windows share pauses with DrivePool backed storage

[JasonC]

It's a minor thing, but something I've noticed since I switched over to DrivePool, when I first hit the file server, there's always a pause partway through displaying the share contents. It shows about the first 15 or 20 folders, pauses for a second or two, and then continues. I also see similar behavior in browsing at least some folders. I haven't been carefully tracking it, but I think it's probably folders with more stuff in them,  

 

I never had this pause when I was using StorageSpaces, and haven't ever seen it with other things, so I'm guessing it's something to do with DrivePool. I suspect maybe it's building/presenting the virtualized filesystem?

 

Anyway, is there anything I can do to mitigate that? On the one hand, it's a small thing, it really doesn't affect me a whole lot. On the other hand, it is a thing I constantly run into, so it's one of those minor irritations that constantly occurs. I always get just a little bit paranoid about it because under other circumstances, it feels like behavior you get when a disk is starting to fail, i.e. retries go through (I've checked, disks are all good).

 

Thanks!

 

[Spider99]

or your server is underpowered and struggles to provide all the info in one go?

 

or your disks are powered down?

 

server is doing something else and is "congested"?

 

could be a lot of things 

[Christopher (Drashna)]

If these are large folders, then this may be normal.

 

Specfically, when listing directory contents, we request the list for each disk, and then display the data as it arrives.  there is no sorting or pre-processing done with the data, so it can cause this sort of effect.

 

if this is especially annoying, there is an advanced config file that does enable some pre-processing.  The caveat is that it will take longer for directories to enumarate, and has an overall negative impact on pool performance.

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings

Set "CoveFs_SortedDirectoryQueries" to "True" and reboot the system.

 

 

Otherwise, try the latest beta and see if that helps:

http://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/StableBit.DrivePool_2.2.0.800_x64_BETA.exe

[JasonC]

or your server is underpowered and struggles to provide all the info in one go?

 

or your disks are powered down?

 

server is doing something else and is "congested"?

 

could be a lot of things 

 

I've checked for performance problems and nothing jumped out as problematic. Disks don't power down, server is generally idle. It's dual 6 core xeons with 48GB memory, although I only have 2 cores and 8GB assigned to the VM. It's not cpu ready at the host or memory pressure in the guest as far as I can tell, but generally I'm normally not hurting for CPU or memory.

[JasonC]

If these are large folders, then this may be normal.

 

Specfically, when listing directory contents, we request the list for each disk, and then display the data as it arrives.  there is no sorting or pre-processing done with the data, so it can cause this sort of effect.

 

if this is especially annoying, there is an advanced config file that does enable some pre-processing.  The caveat is that it will take longer for directories to enumarate, and has an overall negative impact on pool performance.

http://wiki.covecube.com/StableBit_DrivePool_2.x_Advanced_Settings

Set "CoveFs_SortedDirectoryQueries" to "True" and reboot the system.

 

 

Otherwise, try the latest beta and see if that helps:

http://dl.covecube.com/DrivePoolWindows/beta/download/StableBit.DrivePool_2.2.0.800_x64_BETA.exe

 

I'll give updating the software a go, but I imagine it's the disk listing that is the cause. I guessed it was probably something like that but I figured I'd ask in case there were settings I could adjust. I'm able to throw memory/cpu/SSD storage resources at it if it would make it go away, but it's not so bad that I can't live with it either. I just figured it wouldn't hurt to ask. I suppose I could double the core count and see if that helps, but I don't think I've hardly ever seen it peg as it is, so I just kinda wrote that off.

 

Thanks!

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Updating may help, because there are a number of performance optimizations and fixes. 

 

However, as for performance, this is kernel code, not userspace.  Meaning that throwing more resources at the problem probably isn't going to help.  The issue will persist regardless... or minor gains will be had.

 

 

That said, I may be being a bit "over dramatic" here.  If the updated version doesn't help significantly, trry the setting in question. You may not see a huge performance impact on your system.  It may be unnoticeable.  Or it may add a second or two to the directly load times.  It's hard to tell which will be the case.

 

For instance, I did enable this on my system, and I did notice a slight delay. Not huge, but not none.

I'm running a Xeon E3 1245v3 (haswell, 4 cores plus hyperthreading).

[JasonC]

So, just a mildly interesting follow up....

I recently migrated my Drivepool off Windows Server and onto Windows 10 (CrashPlan exiting the home user market motivated it).  Anyway, it's now residing on a Win10 VM with the same configuration as the server machine had, but that little pause I was seeing before when I'd browse to it...I don't see anymore.  It's possible moving to the latest version impacted that as well though. In fact, overall, without any objective measurements, it just feels a little faster/more responsive. (I keep having a "that was quick" reaction as I'm navigating the share).

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, I'm glad to hear it that the new system seems to have fixed the issue!