File copying in Dopus10 much slower than Explorer

Help & Support
1

I've got a license for Directory Opus 10 -- I'm stoked about the upgrade and all its great new features. However, I have noticed a problem that is pretty significant.

I just got a new hard drive, so I'm copying over 1TB of files from one SATA drive to another. Both are connected to SATA ports on different chipsets. I started an unattended copy job, and after about 24 hours, I noticed that the copy was taking much longer than this copy has in the past. It was also far longer than the estimated time given by DOpus. I was copying a lot of MP3s and M4A files (about 3-4 MB each) and getting around 6MB/s. It appeared that the longer the copy went on, the slower it went. Not sure if this is related, but I watched a video for about an hour during the copy and noticed that while watching the video, the speed of the copy dropped down to 1/3 of what it was when the vidoe was paused, indicating that there is some kind of serious CPU bottleneck (My main system drive is an SSD, and is not one of the two drives involved in the copy - the video was being streamed from the web, so there shouldn't have been a big hit to the disk for watching the video).

I decided that I should test this to ensure that it wasn't just in my head, or that it wasn't something screwed up with my drive or system.

I copied one 3.4 folder of MP3s between the two drives involved in this copy (D: and I: which are the same model of drive, a WD Green Power 1.5 TB drive).
I did this with Directory Opus 10 and with Windows 7's Explorer.

I repeated the test twice to try to rule out any variables in the system.



With Directory Opus 10, the copy took 1:31 each time.


With Windows Explorer, the copy took 1:09 both times.

Directory Opus 10 took 22 seconds longer -- a 32% increase over the time Windows Explorer took.

Now that in itself I would say is pretty significant...

But even more disturbingly is the phenomenon I noticed when after a long copy, DOpus 10 was copying files at about 6 MB/s when Windows Explorer was closer to 60. How could there be an entire order of magnitude difference in copy speeds?

I'd be interested in any feedback as to the reasons for the dismal performance demonstrated here by Directory Opus... this issue can make it rather unusable for many situations.

2


(I intended to add this screenshot into the previous post, but the forum wouldn't let me for some reason).

3

Oh... one thing I was thinking was that Directory Opus keeps a constant real-time update of speeds and bytes transferred, while Windows Explorer does this only about every five seconds. I'm wondering if that would be part of the reason for DOpus seemingly using more CPU. I'll have to look into that. Currently when copying, I'm noticing that DOpus 10 uses about 25% CPU on a Q6600 Quad core system at 2.4 GHz.

4

Significant cpu usage... my guess is either you have some columns (or thumbnails/tiles mode) turned on which cause Opus to inspect the files, and since they are video files a video codec Opus is relying on for that is going crazy. That can happen with partial files especially, with some codec versions.

So try disabling the movie plugin and turning off all columns except name date and size.

Another possibility is real-time anti-virus treating Opus differently to Explorer, but since video files are involved I think my first guess is more likely.

Also, see if the same is true for different files and file types. Chances are some particular files are triggering the problem and finding them will help work out where it is.

Finally, stick to large files for now. Copies involving lots of small files complicate things (you have to turn a few copy options off in Opus to make the comparison fair, and buffering plays a bigger part, which can skew resulta in favour of whichever program is tested 2nd)

5

Oops, mp3s not videos. Still, the advise stands, but try disabling the mp3 related plugins as well as the movie one.

6

Wouldn't closing the lister immediately after starting the copy have a similar effect to reconfiguring the lister view and plugins? If I did this, there shouldn't be anything running in the background, correct? I tried this and it doesn't seem to make a big difference, although I haven't tested very precisely. I also didn't notice a difference when disabling relevant plugins...

Could this possibly be related to the "Preserve attributes of copied files" setting? It's got to be something like that. Clearly DOpus is doing something different here that slows down copies immensly for this scenario. I've never had it take an entire day and a half to copy the contents of this hard drive via SATA. It should take under 8 hours.

7

I'd like to test Dopus 9 to see if it performs differently here. Is there a way to run that in Parallel without uninstalling Dopus 10 so that I can do this easily?

8

BTW, This copy job is taking so long that I ended up having to switch to Explorer to finish it. Instead of it taking days, it's taking minutes.

One thing I'm also noticing is that instead of maxing out one of my CPU cores, I'm using around 5% CPU in explorer (highly variable, though), instead of the 25% that DOpus took.

This is really worrying. I'm hoping that there is some glitch here that can be rectified in an update soon :S I might just have to downgrade... very sad since this copy queue is something I've been waiting for for a long time, and I think it's brilliantly implemented, but it's not very helpful at all if the new version takes many times as long to copy the files to begin with.

9

I did a little more testing with a couple of different scenarios:

I performed one single copy of a large file:

single 12.2GB MKV file
Dopus: 2:35 (~7% CPU)
Explorer: 4:30 (~3% CPU)

Dopus is MUCH faster on this transfer! (Explorer took 74% longer)

5GB of fonts (many smaller files, ~ 100Kb each)
Dopus: 11:43 (~22% CPU)
Explorer 4:39 (~10% CPU)

Explorer just kicked the $#!* out of Dopus here... (Dopus took 150% longer).

Is Dopus performing an operation for each individual file that is slowing it down for these multi-file copies? A single copy is actually significantly FASTER in Dopus, but copying several files is WAY slower.

10

Try adjusting copy_buffer_size under Prefs --> Miscellaneous --> Advanced. Others have reported that this can make a significant difference to copy times. If you search this forum for (e.g.) COPY BUFFER you'll find some more discussion.

Regards, AB

11

It's funny you say that. The past two days I've been running the duplicate finder in Dopus and disk activity due to the virus scanner went crazy (Trend Micro Worry Free 7). I've contacted them about this, but it seems there might be something that I can tweak on the directory opus side too?

12

Yes.

When testing the speed of copying lots of small files, turning off everything in Preferences - File Operations - Copy Attributes.

Also, be sure to test each program several times, and mix the order you test them in (so it's not always one program then the other; reverse the order sometimes). Otherwise the first run may be slower because they have to read directories and file data from disk that is then cached in memory for the second run. (And, of course, background tasks may happen to kick-in during some runs and not others, so doing several tests is always a good idea to average things out.)

Usually, yes. Not quite always, but usually.

It's possible something is already going crazy on one of the files before the copy even starts, or that sometime goes crazy the moment the first partial file appears (e.g. I've seen video demuxers/codecs that get stuck in an infinite loop when asked to inspect a half-written AVI file).