Optimal Advanced Settings?

[thepregnantgod]

I saw a wiki article on DrivePool's advanced settings.  Can someone who has experience with this advise me?

 

I want to maximize duplication across all 22-24 drives.

 

I have 16gb RAM and an i73770K (so 4 cores/8 threads).

 

What do you guys recommend?

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Default settings are fine. These are some fine tuning and compatibility settings. For the most part, you shouldn't need to edit the Advanced settings file unless either a) you know what you're doing here, or B.) are instructed to do so by support.

 

Most of the settings also include a brief description of what they do, so it should be pretty self explanatory.

 

But it does depend on exactly what you want to accomplish here.

 

And I'm not sure what you mean by "maximize duplication." Could you explain what you mean here? 

 

 

Also, what version of DrivePool are you using?

[thepregnantgod]

Latest beta.  

 

Maximize duplication - meaning: change it to a foreground task vice background task, increase priority, give it as many cores as possible, as much RAM as possible.

[Christopher (Drashna)]

Well, we don't use lot of CPU or memory. In a large part, because we rely on built in Windows API to handle stuff. And because we want our code as efficient as possible.

 

One thing you may want to check out is this command:

fsutil behavior set memoryusage 2

Details about what this does here: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc785435.aspx

 

For DrivePool specific settings that you may want to check out then:

I believe this just hard codes "Network IO Boost" to be enabled. This prioritizes network IO over local Disk IO, at the cost of CPU cycles

• DrivePool_BackgroundTasksVeryLowPriority - Sets the CPU priority of background tasks such as re-measuring, background duplication and re-balancing to IDLE (Windows Priority 1). Note that this setting does not affect I/O priority which is set separately.
  Setting this to true, will run the service at a higher very low priority. The service handles duplication, balancing, measuring the pool, and any other tasks. However, this won't increase the speed that the actual tasks occur at, as that is dependent more on IO than CPU/memory, I believe.
• DrivePool_VerifyAfterCopy - After performing a file copy (or move), verify that the destination file was copied successfully by comparing it with the source.
  Setting this to true may cause duplication errors, but every time a file is copied (duplicated) or moved to a different disk (such as re-balanced) it will calculate the checksum of the files and compare them. 
• CoveFs_BoostNetworkIoPriorityWrite - Boost the priority of write network I/O.
• FileBalance_BackgroundIO - Use background I/O for re-balancing the pool.
  Setting this to false forces balancing to be done at normal IO priority, instead of "in the background". This may interfere with performance of the pool, but will speed up the process.
• FileDuplication_BackgroundIO - Use background I/O for background file duplication.
  Setting this to false forces duplication to be done at normal IO priority, instead of "in the background". This may interfere with performance of the pool, but will speed up the process.

   

• CoveFs_AsyncCriticalThreads - How many threads to use for critical asynchronous tasks. Asynchronous tasks are used throughout CoveFS to parallelize various file system operations. In particular, this affects how many disks in the pool are accessed at the same time when we need to query all the disks for some information.
  Increasing this may boost performance, at the cost of system resources, however with the specs of the system you have and the number of drives, this may cause a noticeable increase in performance, default is 8)
• CoveFs_AsyncNormalThreads - How many threads to use for normal asynchronous tasks.
  (increasing this may boost performance, at the cost of system resources)

 

I think I'll be checking these out as well, as I have a similar CPU (and much more RAM). 

Also, I'm not 100% certain about all of these settings. The file is mostly a "don't touch unless you're sure about it" sort of thing.