What can I do to prevent file transfers from slowing down my PC?

[cw42]

When transfering large files locally on my PC, and over my network... my PC just get hammered, and gets really slow. What kind of changes can I make to improve the situation?

Opteron 165
Asus A8N-SLI Premium
GSkill HZ PC4000 2GB
Seagate 7200.8 400GB SATA
Maxtor DiamonMax10 300GB SATA
WinXP Pro

 

[imported_ashay]

Assuming it's Windows, disable the swap file completely and have atleast 1GB of Ram. This may cause problems with some games/applications, for example Silent Hunter 3, at which point you can enable swap.

Or use Linux. It doesnt seem to be bothered with large file transfers.

 

[MrPickins]

Originally posted by: ashay
Assuming it's Windows, disable the swap file completely and have atleast 1GB of Ram.

This is bad advice. windows is designed to run with a pagefile.

 

[cw42]

I have 2GB of ram, and have no need for nix. Any other suggestions?

 

[TheSlamma]

Welcome to the classic I/O bottleneck.

Only thing that I know that really helps with that is a Caching card, but those are usually limited to SCSI only. Last one I did was a 3210S with 256meg on it, was night and day for simultanious large files especially.

 

[dexvx]

Originally posted by: ashay
Assuming it's Windows, disable the swap file completely and have atleast 1GB of Ram. This may cause problems with some games/applications, for example Silent Hunter 3, at which point you can enable swap.

Or use Linux. It doesnt seem to be bothered with large file transfers.

What kind of crap advice is that? No comment on the swap file suggestion.

But theres no way that linux is better with large file transfers.

 

[imported_ashay]

It seems other people disagree, but I see big improvements in system response when I'm copying very large files, exrtacting large files when I disable the swap file. I have 1GB ram

Also, if you're running many apps, and you start copying/extracting large files, the other apps get swapped out by Win and take a while to recover. This doesnt happen to me with swap disabled.

You might want to try it... since you can always put it back on if it doesnt help.

 

[henryay]

Cap the transfer speed using a bandwidth throttler like netlimiter.

 

[Kromis]

Will I-Ram help?

 

[HexiumVII]

The only thing that will help is going full SCSI.

 

[alent1234]

our file servers at work for 800 people rarely use more than 300MB of RAM


best thing is to buy another HD and keep all your files on the other HD and to do transfers to disks other than your OS disk

 

[Kyanzes]

Originally posted by: henryay
Cap the transfer speed using a bandwidth throttler like netlimiter.

That, or consider a mobo where the SATA and LAN controllers are binded to the PCI-E. Also try to separate your HDD with the OS from the ones participating in the file transfer (different controller). In the most idealistic scenario the OS / transfer source / transfer target are all on different controllers and none of them binded to the PCI bus. Preferably the LAN controller should also be on the PCI-E bus.

 

[Zim]

Turn off virus protection.