Balancing performance, Increase Priority UI suggestions

[Lawrence]

Hello, I've been using Drivepool without any big issues and generally very satisified with it.

However it took me almost half a year before I discovered I could speed up the balancing process by pressing the double arrow icon ▶▶.
Even after pressing it, I was not sure it was doing anything, because the visual feedback is very minimal.

Only after I checked my disk usage, I could see what massive difference it makes. Enabling this option fully saturated the disk throughput speeds. It's exactly what I wanted.

Suggestion:

• Make this button more visible
• Provide context, like a mouseover text, similiar to when you go to Manage Pool > Performance > options...
• Give the user clearer visual clues that it is active.
• Pool Performance and Disk Performance show 0 activity when balancing, shouldnt it display the balancing performance?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

It should give a tooltip of "Increase Priority".  

Some of this is covered by: https://stablebit.com/Support/DrivePool/2.X/Manual?Section=Pool Organization Bar

But specifically, balancing and duplication tasks use a background I/O priority.  This means that other I/O (such as you reading media from the drives) gets priority over the balancing.  This helps prevent these tasks from interferring with normal usage of the pool. 
Increasing priority means that it uses the same, "normal" priority, and may perform faster at the cost of impacting pool performance. 
 

Quote

 

 Pool Performance and Disk Performance show 0 activity when balancing, shouldnt it display the balancing performance?

 

That is correct. This only shows activity that goes through the pool driver.  Balancing and duplication tasks do not, and are not shown herer.  This is namely because the "performance counters" for the disks only show that information.