1.0.2.6278 Network I/0 UI option??

johnpoz

Ok Maybe I am blind, but where is this UI Option, currently running 
1.0.2.6278..  Back in build 6229 it says there was a UI option added, was it then removed?

1.0.2.6229
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* Added UI option for network I/O prioritization to the Disks DrivePool tab.
  After some testing, this option seems to be effective at minimizing stutter when streaming high bandwidth media 

Alex

See:

DrivePool tab -> Disks

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This came about as a result of streaming some full 50 G Blu-Ray disks from one of my WHS test machines. I noticed that about every 30 to 60 minutes the Cyberlink player, which was playing on a different machine would start to stutter.

I tracked the problem down to WHS 2011 running some backup tasks that were completely locking everything up. It was doing this even though no backups were set up on the server (client or server).

Needless to say, this was pretty annoying and made streaming movies difficult to watch.

My solution was to prioritize network I/O requests going to the drive over all other local I/O request. We do this only for non-cached I/O. In other words, Windows' automatic read-ahead cache will still read at normal priority, but when we run out of cache we immediately boost priority to service the newly incoming I/O requests as quickly as possible.

There is a small CPU overhead to doing this, but it seems to have solved the stuttering problem in my testing.