Grig Software

I use the V 3.4.1640 on a VISTA Business Edition to synchronize between 2 FreeNAS (www.freenas.org) Server (with CIFS/SMB). The preview process (to compare the 300GB Data, around 155.000 Files) takes a very long time.

If I use a WinXP SP3 Pro Machine to do the same job, it takes only some secondes to compare the directories/files. It is a very significant difference.

Is there a problem with Synchronize It! on Vista? Any suggestions?

Vista is known for it's bad network performance to something other than another Vista or Server 2008 network node. FreeNAS falls outside this category, so performance is bad. Vista SP1 is meant to improve this, but in some cases it doesn't, or hardly so.
Another case might be you access the shares through UNC paths, this makes the poor network performance even worst. Creating drive-mappings would improve this, usually by much.

HTH
Ton

Thanks for your advice - I tried it (with drive letters) -> but it makes no difference (compared to the UNC access). There is the same poor performance (during the scanning process for the preview with Synchronize IT!).

I have never used that NAS thing, but with local sync there was no problems so far. What about plain folder copy in explorer - can you compare time required to copy your files in XP and vista?

The filecopy speed during the synchronisation process itself is ok - around 70MBit/s (100MBit/s Ethernet). That´s really good!

It´s just the slow process to scan the folders & files (to compare which files are different) within Vista. I don´t know what it is, but it´s not as important - maybe the Servicepack 2 for Vista solves that behavior

From my experiences with SI, I have a somewhat different opinion than my fellow posters :

It is NOT surprising that comparing 300 GB of data (155.000 files!) takes several minutes on Vista. This is the normal time it takes to compare that many files!

It IS surprising that on XP it takes only a few seconds, which seems almost unimaginable to me (maybe the drives were cached somehow???).

You will obtain a somewhat significant improvement in speed however, if you let SI run minimized or covered by another window, because a lot of the speed lag results from screen redraws especially if you have a lot of files that are different. This tip is valid for XP and should be valid for Vista also.

For your reference here are my XP test results from June using freeware timer.exe from Igor Pavlov - the test laptop is no speed demon (P4M 2GHZ, single core, shared graphics, UDMA Mode 5/ 100) therefore your results could of course be better but not by any huge factor, I think:

Much less than 7min. (late closing of program) v3.4.1633 Cursor follows search on (date or content) 211000 files compare to drive with only 3 differences in minimized mode

Kernel Time  =    58.859 = 00:00:58.859 =  13%
User Time    =    30.015 = 00:00:30.015 =   7%
Process Time =    88.875 = 00:01:28.875 =  20%
Global Time  =   425.813 = 00:07:05.813 = 100%

about 13min. v3.4.1633 Cursor follows search on (date or content) 211000 files compare to drive with only 3 differences in foreground mode

Kernel Time  =   375.109 = 00:06:15.109 =  47%
User Time    =    53.359 = 00:00:53.359 =   6%
Process Time =   428.468 = 00:07:08.468 =  54%
Global Time  =   781.985 = 00:13:01.985 = 100%

about 5min40sec.. v3.4.1633 Cursor follows search on (date or content) 211000 files COMPARE TO ALMOST EMPTY FOLDER WITH ALL FILES DIFFERENT but in minimized mode

Kernel Time  =    63.484 = 00:01:03.484 =  18%
User Time    =    98.328 = 00:01:38.328 =  28%
Process Time =   161.812 = 00:02:41.812 =  47%
Global Time  =   344.218 = 00:05:44.218 = 100%

about 5min40sec.. v3.4.1633 Cursor follows search on (date or content) 211000 files COMPARE TO ALMOST EMPTY FOLDER WITH ALL FILES DIFFERENT running in background but NOT in minimized mode

Kernel Time  =    88.953 = 00:01:28.953 =  26%
User Time    =    89.171 = 00:01:29.171 =  26%
Process Time =   178.125 = 00:02:58.125 =  52%
Global Time  =   339.500 = 00:05:39.500 = 100%

These results confirm that the performance of SI is slowed down significantly due to screen redraws.

When I started doing tests in minimized or background mode, where there were no screen redraws, the program performed very fast - a fraction of the foreground results (5min40sec. vs. 27 min checking folders with all 211000 files different). This means the program performs ~450% SLOWER in foreground than in background operation.

As a remedy I would suggest to introduce to SI an "Express Mode" where no live preview results are shown!

Another variation is a mode where SI minimizes itself automatically when starting an Express Preview Run and shows a pop-up message when it is finished. This would allow checking the progress by bringing it to the foreground again.

Regards,

Brahman

Thank you, Brahman. A similiar testing from original poster would be helpful indeed.