TuxRunner

I’ve been noticing that there’s a bit of a performance issue with the new setup (Drobo on a Linux box using NTFS filesystem).  I guess I’m not completely shocked.  I mean, I am basically making a Linux box work with a Windows filesystem, and then also present it as a Windows share on the network (via Samba).  There’s bound to be some tweaking that has to occur.

So far the real bottleneck appears to be related to the NTFS-3G module that facilitates the communication between Linux and the NTFS filesystem on my Drobo.  The wife tried to copy 26 GB of video files over the network to the Drobo, and when I checked “top” on the server, there’s a “mount.ntfs-3g” process that was soaking up 88% CPU, and my load average was about 1.4 – 1.6 (on a dual proc system).

So, it looks like there’s quite a bit of overhead to getting Linux to fully interact with NTFS.  I really don’t want to go to EXT3 on this thing though.  Drobo Inc. claims they support it, but it still sounds like there’s issues with it.  I could just buy the Droboshare module that would basically put the Drobo on the network, but that eliminates me having all this fun with Linux and making it do my dirty work.

If I can find time this week, I might research this kernel module a little more to see if there’s some tweaking I can do to make it a little faster.