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PP1 Network / Demigrator Performance Issues
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Author:  Maliclipse [ Mon Aug 18, 2008 5:19 pm ]
Post subject:  PP1 Network / Demigrator Performance Issues
Last night I began moving large files around (20-30GB ISOs) and noticed that the intial burst performance to about 2gb is great running at 50-85MB/s (thats megabytes) then it would drop to a crawl of 1-3MB/s for a few minutes then burst again 2-4GB at max speed. This was very puzzeling as when I RDCed into the system no process was taking up 100% cpu. I thought it was the demigrator but it had sat idle. The connector console was completely unusable during the transfer.

Pre-PP1 I had very consistant performance starting out at 85-90MB/s and tapering off to about 50MB/s never the lumpy graphs I'm experiencing today. My MSS is by no means full (500gb out of 2.25TB) and I couldn't find any process that was really holding up the system. The only thing I noticed was that the MSS disks were grinding excessively during the transfer. Mine has 2GB of ram and in task manager nothing was paging.

Anyone know of a utility to see which files / services are killing the disks in W2K3? In vista we have the resource monitor and it would be great to have the equivalent in WHS.
Author:  Greg H [ Mon Aug 18, 2008 6:25 pm ]
Post subject: 
CTRL-ALT-DELETE

TASK MANAGER

PROCESSES.

You can see what processes are running.

Click on the CPU tab to sort by %age of cpu used.

the TASK MANAGER is the same as it was in Win XP, and Vista.
Author:  Maliclipse [ Mon Aug 18, 2008 7:49 pm ]
Post subject: 
Hey Greg,

As stated in my first post I ran the task manager and no process was taking up any significant amount of CPU. The system idle proccess was in the 90s the whole time.

Further the "Resource Monitor" in vista is quite different from the task manager in Vista, XP, or 2k3. Attached is a picture of the behavior I'm experiencing. This is a screen shot of the resource monitor. You can use it to drill down into offending processes broken down by disk, cpu, network, and memory usage. 2k3 does not have anything like this.

Image

So as you can see the transfer speed runs well at over 500mbit, then slows down to about 50 for the same amount of time, then back up to 500mbit.

Prior to PP1 the transfer speed was very consistant and did not fluctuate like this.

Anyone else experience this behavior?

Thanks!

Michal
Author:  rrinker [ Mon Aug 18, 2008 7:53 pm ]
Post subject: 
Look under Administrator Tools for Performance. There are a zillion counters you cna fire up and chart, per a particular process or for the system as a whole. The Vista thing is essentially an altered user interface into this data.
Author:  JohnBick [ Tue Aug 19, 2008 12:56 pm ]
Post subject: 
Are you looking at the Task Manager in the client or the server? You may want to RDP into the server (or use the Advanced Admin Console Add-In) and look at the activity there while this is all going on.

But you may not see that much in terms of CPU activity. My guess would be that the Drive Extender is moving data from Disk 0 off to one of your other disks. This is generally I/O bound as opposed to being CPU intensive. The easiest way to see that is to get the Disk management Add-In and look at the disk activity. And yes, it is different in PP1 than it was before, probably as a consequence of fixing the "Data Corruption bug".

I have not been moving huge amounts of data recently, but I do see a difference in the manner these MSS-internal bursts of activity take place with PP1.
Author:  Maliclipse [ Tue Aug 19, 2008 1:11 pm ]
Post subject: 
I've been looking at the task manager output on the MSS itself through RDP.

I spent some time in perfmon last night and looked at the disk activity specifically and the disk queues were maxed out during the large transfers. Guess they may have changed the way the disk subsystem works in PP1. You're probably correct regardin the drive extender slowing things down. Even though it doesn't show any significant CPU utilization in task manager its probably slowing the process down to prevent data coruption.

I would prefer to be able to run the drive extender on a schedule. It would be nice to let you fill up the first drive and then have the ability to manually kick it in or run it nightly to redistribute.
Author:  JohnBick [ Tue Aug 19, 2008 1:52 pm ]
Post subject: 
While I understand your point I would worry about the shares, especially if multiple people were able to update a file...

I suspect this will get some additional fine-tuning over time. You may want to comment over on the "official" MS WHS forum...
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