During the test, only the Filr initial synchronization processes ran on the ESXi box. Content Indexing and Just-in-time synchronization (JITS) were turned off.
As illustrated above, the Filr VAs and the OES server were hosted on a single VMware ESXi server.
All communication was local to the VM host server. No external network traffic was generated.
The Net Folder synchronization process is multithreaded and the synchronization tests were run using the default synchronization settings, which are:
Up to five Net Folders synchronizing simultaneously
For example, a system with five or more Net Folders will work on synchronizing up to five NetFolders simultaneously until all of the Net Folders have been synchronized.
The testbed used for this whitepaper had 45 Net Folders, so five synchronized at the same time until all were completed.
Four threads devoted to each synchronization process
Multithreading of Net Folder synchronization processes has contributed to the substantial synchronization improvements in Filr 1.1.
The system administration utility lets you configure the number of threads for each sync process. This number cannot exceed three times the number of processors configured for the Filr appliance.
For the testbed Filr appliance (which has four processors configured), this means that the synchronization process could have had as many as 12 threads devoted to each Net Folder synchronization (four CPUs * three threads). This would result in a total of 60 active threads servicing sync processes (5 Net Folders at a time * 12 threads = 60).
However, the thread setting was not modified, so the 45 Net Folders were synchronized using four threads each, resulting in a total of 20 threads. In the testbed, the default settings resulted in quite good performance and did not need optimization.
For more information, see Net Folder Configuration
in the Novell Filr 1.0 Appliance Configuration Guide.