What's the first thing you do with your WHS?

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gehenna

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#194855 9-Feb-2009 10:00

well it looks to me like my WHS hates it when more than one thing is happening at once.

e.g. I get mad stuttering when I'm watching something from the videos folder in the lounge, and another PC is backing up. OR, if I'm ripping a DVD to the movies folder, and watching something in the lounge - my lounge stream just gets really choppy.

If only one thing is happening at once - e.g. watching a show/dvd in the lounge, then everything is fine.

I guess something to do with how the storage pool works? lots of read/writes at the same time makes for a painful experience. I can imagine this is the case if its writing across multiple drives at once, or reading from multiple drives at once.

I'm not sure upping my bandwidth will help with this. Perhaps I'll just need to stick to one job at a time.

freitasm

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#194858 9-Feb-2009 10:26

If you have not already, make sure all drives have the property sets to advanced cache (device manager, settings). Also there will be a LOT of I/O activity while it is doing the initial duplication and balancing.

This should last a couple of days by the looks of it - your storage pool is quite large and just enabled duplication...

Nety

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#194861 9-Feb-2009 10:44

OK couple of things that I have found.

Set the backups to happen when you are not going to be using the PC's. During the backups both the performace on the PC being backed up and on the server will be heavily impacted.

Use gig between your heavier use PC's and the home server. You can quite easily flood 100meg.

I do not use duplication on folders that require high performance ie HD movies. The overhead is quite high and because of the size of the files seems to be even worse.
It might be OK on a higher end server then what I am running but I find the overhead just a little too much.
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Ragnor

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#194866 9-Feb-2009 11:12

freitasm: If you have not already, make sure all drives have the property sets to advanced cache (device manager, settings). Also there will be a LOT of I/O activity while it is doing the initial duplication and balancing.

This should last a couple of days by the looks of it - your storage pool is quite large and just enabled duplication...

I always chuckle when I see that one in tweak guides, it says "advanced" and "performance" it must be good!

Sadly what you see here is one of the negative side effects of the modern tech blogsphere. Copy and paste journalism - where authors aren't even testing on investigating the tweaks they are suggesting anymore!

See here for the truth about the "Advanced Performance" straight from Microsoft.
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/magazine/2007.04.windowsconfidential.aspx

freitasm

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#194867 9-Feb-2009 11:19

I don't see a problem. It's an option that tells you feel it's ok to ignore flush requests and just keep doing your processing - things will accumulate if needed to and if you run a stable system, with power backup then why not?

Ragnor

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#194871 9-Feb-2009 11:32

Here's another quote about the setting:

The Enable advanced performance setting is actually a compatibility setting for software that took advantage of a bug in early versions of Windows. The bug let programs believe that a piece of data had been written to the physical layer of the disk when it could still in fact be processing in the drive buffer. When Microsoft later fixed that bug there was so many reports about database programs beginning to perform slowly that they had to bring the buggy behavior back in. This settings is a leftover from that period and no properly programmed software of today should retain this behavior, but very old database engines might.

Their choice of name for this setting is quite unfortunate.

gehenna

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#194877 9-Feb-2009 12:41

freitasm: If you have not already, make sure all drives have the property sets to advanced cache (device manager, settings). Also there will be a LOT of I/O activity while it is doing the initial duplication and balancing.

This should last a couple of days by the looks of it - your storage pool is quite large and just enabled duplication...

Fairly sure my storage pool is fully duplicated now, so would i gain anything by enabling this? it also says that it's recommended only for disks with a backup power supply as it increases the risk of data loss if the disk loses power.....

I don't have a ups if that's what it's referring to

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Ragnor

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#194896 9-Feb-2009 13:56

Probably depends on your usage when I mucked around with some hard drive benchmarks with "Advanced Performance" enabled I saw a slight increase in sequential write speed 5-10MB/s, however I also saw 10ms higher seek times and ~ 5-10MB/s lower burst write rates. If I recall recorrectly reads weren't really changed much.

I suggust you do some benchmarks when no one is using the WHS. Also check perfmon disk counters when people are actively using the WHS.

paul151

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#194978 9-Feb-2009 20:24

Nety:
Set the backups to happen when you are not going to be using the PC's. During the backups both the performace on the PC being backed up and on the server will be heavily impacted.

Yes agree with this, it can make a difference.

Nety:
Use gig between your heavier use PC's and the home server. You can quite easily flood 100meg.

I'm planning on doing this also

Nety:
I do not use duplication on folders that require high performance ie HD movies. The overhead is quite high and because of the size of the files seems to be even worse.

Have not found this but I'm running 2 gigs on a dual core system

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