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Old April 27th 20, 10:44 PM posted to alt.comp.os.windows-10,comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.storage
Yousuf Khan[_2_]
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Posts: 1,296
Default Why is this folder so slow?

On 4/27/2020 2:29 PM, VanguardLH wrote:
As a test, disable your anti-virus software and run your TB data-only
backup job.


Yes, that's been done years ago too. This folder has been a major
headache for years now. And at one time, I found that the AV software
spending tons of time scanning this folder too, so I put an exclusion in
it for this folder. The AV doesn't ever scan in this folder anymore.

As another test, make sure to*exit* Thunderbird (check there are no
instances of TB in Task Manager's Processes tab), and check if the
backup job is just as slow.


Yeah, but it doesn't matter, Thunderbird's email folders don't suffer
from this problem. So even if Thunderbird were running in the
background, and even if it were VSS aware, then this problem would be
happening during backups of the email store as well, but it's only
happening in the newsgroup store. The email store is much, much more
active than the newsgroup store, but emails aren't affected, just
newsgroups.

VSS will encounter problems with databases that are not VSS aware.
Microsoft's SQL Server is VSS aware, but others are not. The
recommendation in backup programs, even those using VSS, for database
programs that are not VSS aware is to schedule their shutdown before the
backup, schedule the backup while the database program is down, and
restart the database program after the backup finishes. While this can
be done using Task Scheduler using event triggers (provided the database
program issues an event on shutdown), it's a pain to figure out the
script-like code you have to use to define for the trigger of the
scheduled event. There are schedulers that are more flexible that can
make their events dependent: task 3 runs only after task 2 ran and
returned good status which runs only after task 1 completed and returned
good status.


Thunderbird never downloads newsgroup messages in the background, like
it does with email, it only downloads them when you explicitly open the
newsgroups account. This is also related to what I said above about how
much more busier the Thunderbird email store is compared to the
newsgroup store. Thunderbird may be doing things in the background but
only with email.

It's not related to VSS, I've already given you the most likely cause of
the problem: there are over half million files, and each file is
inefficiently taking up little over half of the NTFS cluster, rather
than spreading a lesser number of files over many clusters. The real
question is how can we make NTFS more efficient at handling all of these
little files? NTFS is great at handling big files, but tiny little files
no so much.

Yousuf Khan