[Technical] FTP performance

[Jason Clarke]

Hi Jim,

Linux is 'generally' better at caching files in memory than Windows
desktop operating systems. What is more than likely happening is linux
is caching the file(s) you are FTPing down in memory so that reads from
the disk aren't as punishing. The windows machine is likely to not be
caching as much of the file in memory so that the hard drive is having
to seek a lot more.

Apart from running Raid0 or Raid10, you're probably not going to get
much better performance out of the machine.

As for work arounds.. Ghost multi-cast is what we use here. We're
probably moving to Altiris shortly though.

Cheers,

Jason

-----Original Message-----
From: tech-bounces at edulists.com.au [mailto:tech-bounces at edulists.com.au]
On Behalf Of Jim Maunder
Sent: Friday, 19 September 2008 9:05 AM
To: Technical Discussion in Schools Mailing List
Subject: [Technical] FTP performance

Hello All -

I have a small technical query about FTP/network throughput/Windows 
disk performance. I am fairly ignorant about such things, having just 
enough knowledge to be a danger to the organisation.

Nearly every term break I re-image the lab computers, and in the past 
have used DOS boot disks to either connect to a Windows share (using 
Windows for Workgroups extensions for DOS) on a Win98 machine, or to 
a network drive (using a DOS ODI driver) and DriveImage2000. More 
recently I have been using Novell StoreManager on a WinPE DVD to 
connect to a FTP servers. Last year the FTP server was our intranet 
box (running some kind of linux). A typical re-image would take 12 
mins for 1 PC, 30 minutes for 2 PCs and an hour for 6 PCs.

This year I have been using a WinXP box (plenty big, lots of RAM, 
single SATA disk, gigabyte LAN card) with FileZilla FTP server 
running, and this is where my query comes from. A typical re-image 
now takes about 7 minutes (the same tame it would take to copy the 
image files from the server) for a single PC, 45 minutes for 2 PCs 
and 2 hours for 6 PCs. What causes this dramatic reduction in speed, 
and is there a workaround that does not involve Ghost or Zenworks?

(This time I do 2 PCs at a time - one via the network and FTP, the 
other using a 16Gb USK stick, and this keeps me fully occupied as 
both take about 6-7 minutes to do)

Sorry about the longwinded waffle, but I got to the question eventually.

rgds
Jim





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Jim Maunder
Laptop and PC Support Technician
Ruyton Girls School
Melbourne, Australia
ph 03 9290 9374


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