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Old 08-10-2007, 06:14 PM  
Yil
Too much time...
 
Join Date: May 2005
Posts: 1,194
Default Update

Zer0: I don't think the problem has really gone away, but masking it isn't a bad thing right now... I too have noticed startup times are longer in some setups, but it's only startup times. The actual performance once running doesn't appear to be very different between 5.x and 6.x. One noticable difference is FXP SSL is probably being used a lot more with 6.x since it works now and that will have a noticable impact over non-SSL transfers.

I will look into the extra startup overhead though since I've seen that as well, but there ARE substantial differences in shutdown times for an active server. 5.x didn't really exit so much as crash. 6.x "gracefully" exits and thus takes longer on an active system. It's not perfect but it's definitely an improvement.

*** NOTE: I suggest a change to the ioftpd.ini file:
MessageCache_Size = 100

I upped to it 1000 at one point in the past to see the performance difference, but I never had a ftp server with enough .message files to create all 1000 entries. The problem is windows sucks at handling a 1000 files in a directory so best keep it at 100 or so. ioFTPD is impacted a little, but actually browsing the directory in explorer sucks...


neoxed: Interesting. I'll keep an eye out, but I haven't noticed really poor memory usage. Starting ioFTPD and then issuing a list -alR to populate the directory cache and then comparing the memory usage a week later on didn't result in significant growth difference between the two versions. It wasn't a heavily used server, so if anyone has any data points feel free to chime in. At the moment I'll trade slow memory growth for increased stability...

hukker: Directories with huge number of subdirectories or links will be slow. However less than a thousand subdirs shouldn't be long enough to timeout the connection provided the directories are all local. I have seen cases with network shares where that times is measured in minutes however so avoid that where possible and keep the files local or the fanout manageable. The No_SubDir_Sizing option is key to improving performance in these situations though.

One reason you might see dramatic poor performance in a local directory is disk errors. Use one of the freely available SMART apps to make sure the drive isn't re-allocating sectors which might indicate a drive that is dieing... Also, tools like filemon can be used to see what ioFTPD is doing. Look at the timestamps and see if it's just slow overall or if particular directories are troublesome.


Doh! It just occurred to me, but I'll have to take a look at the IP mask/host startup code. I open every userfile on startup now in order to create a list of valid host/IP's if stealth mode is enabled (Reject_Unknown_Ips). I didn't think that would be terribly expensive, but that's a definite difference in the startup logic between 5.x and 6.x since it involves a lot of locking, parsing, etc... I can probably avoid doing that if the option isn't enabled.

Anybody with 50 users out there want to time startup versus the default ioFTPD on their machine?
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