Hello there,

recently i was asking myself why my box has such high i/o load and cpu usage when copying data to an NTFS volume. Could you give some hints how to check or optimize the setup of fuse and/or ntfs-3g from ground up? That would be really nice. I'm using Mandriva linux 2009.1 and since you have mentioned often that your cpu usage is somewhere between 2-5% i'm curious about this, mostly my cpu usage is somewhere near ~50%, for some friends of mine they have experienced much higher cpu usage, up to 90%.

program versions:
ntfs-3g-2009.4.4-1mdv2009.1
fuse-2.7.4-4.1mdv2009.1
libfuse2-2.7.4-4.1mdv2009.1

Regards

Some additional info:

fstab entry


mount output for partiton in question:

Hi,


Depending on how you use ntfs-3g, you may get significant improvements when using the Advanced version : http://pagesperso-orange.fr/b.andre/adv ... fs-3g.html

Regards

Jean-Pierre

How do i use ntfs-3g? Mostly all of the time copying files from an NTFS data partition to an external harddrive with NTFS. No fancy permission stuff or whatever. I just want to achieve lower system load.

FWIW, how does partition size affect performance?
How much does it matter copying from/to, say a 10GB partition in relation to, say a 500GB partition?

Hi,


The performance depends on the file sizes, the length of the paths to the files, the fragmentation, the filling of the partition, the size of the clusters and other parameters.

So do I.

Writing on an empty partition is faster than writing on a full partition. Writing on a small partition is more likely to increase fragmentation.

The only way to know is to try.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

What about the initial question about fuse setup?
Can there be anything wrong which translates to bad performance or can there be anything improved?

And i'll try with the Advanced Features version and will report back.

Hi,


Your setup is quite standard, I have no comment about it.

Among the known things which lead to bad performance on file creation are fragmentation, sparse files and over filled volumes. These were the situations which came as top of CPU consumers when doing things like unpacking a Linux source tarball or a metadata sparse file, and they have all been improved in the Advanced version.

Of course your usage may be different and you may get different results.

Regards

Jean-Pierre

I'm, too, having performance problems. I have a single core 2 GHz processor, and copying files to AND from a USB external HDD (size: 160 Gb) taxes my CPU to horrendous levels (as in, 100%). I did some tests:
- using the 'generic' 2009.4.4 ntfs-3g build with a no-option compiling
- using the 'generic' 2009.4.4 ntfs-3g build with a --disable-library compiling
- using the Advanced version (2009.4.4AR17) with a --disable-library compiling
- using a 2.6.29 NTFS included driver for read tests only
- using ext3 instead of NTFS.

I must mention too that the NTFS partition was created under Linux, is 160Gb in size and was empty before I dumped 35 Gb of data in it. I also used ntfsresize to defragment it, just to see if it helped.

I barely reach 20 Mb/sec on it with all versions of ntfs-3g, be it on writes or reads, on single big files or several small files transfer.

When I test under ext3 (journaling enabled), I get close to 40 Mb/sec (the maximum USB practical transfer rate), with CPU use under 15%.

To be fair, I also get 100% CPU use if I mount the drive with the in-kernel NTFS driver (so it's probably not a FUSE problem). But it still manages 25% better transfer speed (25 Mb/sec instead of 20).

I used Gnome 2.26 to perform small files copies, but I did large files copies with a cat origin_file.iso | pv -r > target_file.iso bash command.

Is there something in NTFS that makes using it through a USB interface suck?