FolderSizes Help

This window exposes options relating to advanced product usage scenarios.

 

File System Analysis Thread Pool Size

 

Specifies the number of threads available for file system analysis work.

 

The default thread pool size is suitable for most file system analysis workloads. In scenarios where you have higher levels of I/O latency (due to network conditions, etc.), you may find that increasing the thread pool size helps performance.

 

Thread pool sizing will also affect the number of I/O requests made during file system analyses, with larger sizes increasing the number of I/O requests. Therefore, setting this value too aggressively can negatively impact system performance.

 

FolderSizes also offers a low-priority I/O mode option that works with Windows to reduce the priority of file system analysis I/O requests. This option can be useful in scenarios where you wish to analyze file systems while keeping the I/O impact to a minimum.

 

In-Memory File Tracking

 

•Track file data in memory during folder size report scanning and snapshot import

 

When this option is enabled, FolderSizes will track file data in system memory when generating folder reports. This increases the granularity of some folder report displays (including those created from snapshots) and eliminates the need for additional file system access when browsing through report contents. However, a small amount of memory will be allocated for each file encountered during the scan - increasing memory usage and (modestly) decreasing scan performance.

 

If this option is disabled, FolderSizes will initially store only folder-level system data in memory. File data will be fetched from the file system as needed to support folder report drill-down operations. This mode allows FolderSizes to create folder reports for extremely large file systems faster, and with less memory usage.

 

We recommend disabling this feature when creating folder reports for file systems containing a very large number of files or where report generation performance is a priority.

 

Deferred Owner Lookup

 

For folder size reports, FolderSizes will normally extract file system object ownership data as late as possible (during report display) to improve scan performance. Looking up owner data is inherently time consuming, especially for remote (network) volumes, so this default can help scans to complete as fast as possible.

 

Sometimes, however, it may be preferable to extract ownership data during the file system analysis. For example, if you intend to export a folder size report in XML file format, you may want every node of the resulting XML file to contain file ownership data (rather than just the nodes that have been displayed).

 

This setting applies to folder size reports only.