Will FancyCache allow caching of network mapped drives?

[Axel Mertes]

Hi!

We have here a bunch of machines that connect to a file server. Typically the local disks aren't the big issue, but the shared network drive(s) from the server are the bottleneck.
We want to cache them on a local disk or SSD, so we get much quicker access, plus we can reduce network load, thereby accelerating the network in general.

Will that be possible in FancyCache?

We tried Windows 2008 R2/Windows 7 BranchCache, but it makes no sense, as its not design to work for local networks. It expects latencies in the WAN range, which we clearly not have.

Further, to accelerate the server in itself, how would you recommend to configer FancyCache on the server and what kind of SSD etc. would you recommend?


Regards,
Axel

[Support]

Generally FC can apply to this scenario. You might enable FC on the server's shared disks. How performance improves mostly depends on how much memory is used as cache. Of course, more memory, better performance. Regarding the other settings, you might change the caching strategy according to your environemnt. please refer to http://www.romexsoftware.com/en-us/fanc ... /help.htmlfor more details.

[Axel Mertes]

We are going to test FancyCache on a Windows 2008 R2 server with 4 SSDs as Cache RAID. We will see how that actually improves the servers I/O reaction time.

BUT

My original question was meant in a different way. We do not want to cache the files on the server, but on the slowly connected clients.
Imagine, 30 machines are connected to the server via Gigabit Ethernet. The server has 4 to 8 Gigabit Ethernet connections to the switch. It is unable to fill them all with I/Os, as this is beyond the system performance. For this we might want a server side FancyCache as you suggested.
The idea and my question is now, can FancyCache on a local client allow the caching of files from a remote network share?
Think of having a shared volume on the server. You connect to the server and mount the network share under a local drive path. I want to cache files from that local drive!

Right now, nothing like this is possible. When I open FancyCache i can see only physical drives or volumes on local physical drives. I do not see the network drives.

After all, especially the network drives are those that bring the biggest benefit in caching. Each time you have a cache hit, the network does not need to perform an I/O and therefor it free's up the network total bandwidth, plus the server I/O throughput. The less files the server needs to serve at once, the less head seeks are going to happen, and the higher the total I/O count will be.

So I really demand FancyCache to support network shares mounted from remote servers. If in any way possible, please make that happen.

Windows 7 has branch cache, which is pretty much what we are looking for. The problem is the I/O trigger is so long that it doesn't really work on a local disk.

FancyCache has the potential to fill that gap I hope.

Please let us know!

If that works, we will surely have it on all our PCs very soon.

Regards,
Axel

[Support]

Ok, I see. Thanks for the explanation.
Currently we simply skip the network drives and removable dirves. We'll try to support them later.

[ianken]

I really need this feature (I think). I sent a email to support with this request. Here's my scenario:

I have a Media Center PC on a wifi-N bridge on the 5Ghz band. It's typically OK, but for high bandwidth content it frequently falters. An aggressive client side read-ahead cache tuned for the streaming media scenario that takes advantage of and smooths out the burst nature of wifi would be awesome.

In fact, the ability to filter on file name extensions would would be even better. IE: tell the client side cache to read ahead only on media file types you specify.

Build this, price it right and then advertise at AVS Forum and TheGreeenButton and you'd have quite a few consumer media enthusiasts as users if it worked well since pulling a hardline is not feasible for many folks.

-Ian

[Support]

Hi ianken,

Thanks for your suggestion.