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Download your copy of the StableBit DrivePool, StableBit Scanner or StableBit CloudDrive here
Follow Covecube on Twitter.DrivePool 4105 - Fast directory listing
DrivePool BETA M3 1.0.0.4105 implements Direct file I/O - fast directory listing.
Implementing fast directory listing was a bit more challenging than the rest of the kernel based Direct file I/O functionality so far. It took a bit more time, but it's now complete.
How to turn it on
DrivePool ships with this feature off for now, but you can easily turn it on from the DrivePool tab, in DrivePool Settings. Once you turn it on, that setting is saved and will remain on after reboot.
Performance gains
How much faster is this than the non-optimized code?
This will depend on a few things, the number of drives in the pool, the number of files in each directory, and the application being used to query the directory.
Compared to the old method:
- More files in a directory = more performance gain
- More drives in the pool = more performance gain
- Some applications will open each file as they are listing it. If your application does this, you might see a significant slow down because opening files is not optimized yet, but will be in the future.
For example, on a quad core AMD Phenom II X4 3.2 Ghz, listing 3000+ files took around 5 seconds. With the new code it completes in under 1 second.
Things to watch out for
Just like with the other Direct file I/O code, this is fresh off the press and might have some issues.
Here are some of the things that can go wrong:
- Files not being listed in a directory that are really there.
- Extra files showing up in a listing that shouldn't be there.
- Applications crashing because the listing is not in the format that they expect.
- System crashes due to a bug in the kernel code.
Right now, there are no known issues, so 4105 is being released for public testing.
Follow the usual guidelines outlined on the wiki to upload crash dumps / report problems.
What's next
M3 has been very educational. Thank you everyone for your feedback. While many are using M3 with no problems at all, there are a few issues that keep coming up from time to time. We are making architectural changes to fix these for M4.
In particular, next on the work list is NTFS security settings and file deletion. Those things have to be made more reliable and faster, so we're going to have kernel Direct file I/O for those as well.