Yet another shared folders discussion - Speed

[fcpk]

Hello all,

I am running the latest vmware workstation(6.5.1-126130) on a Q6600 quadcore host running windows 2008 x64.

Shared folders are enabled, the guest is a linux debian with latest vmware-tools installed.

In the guest:

$ dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/hgfs/D/test bs=1M count=200

200+0 records in

200+0 records out

209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 8.1291 s, 25.8 MB/s

Are these speeds normal? They sound pretty slow(locally I've benchmarked the disk at 150MB/s since it's raid, so it's not disk limiting)

I see no cpu spike either so I'd have to assume it's not cpu either. I've tried disabling the guest's network interfaces hoping to change a thing, but it did not.

The speeds are the same the other way round:

$ dd if=/mnt/hgfs/D/test of=/dev/null bs=1M

200+0 records in

200+0 records out

209715200 bytes (210 MB) copied, 7.93716 s, 26.4 MB/s

The relevant hgfs entry:

.host:/ on /mnt/hgfs type vmhgfs (rw,ttl=5)

I've tried other block sizes to see if they changed anything but 1M seems relatively optimal.

Thanks for any hints and info,

fcpk

[continuum]

Why do you use shared folders ?

They are known to be slow and unreliable - use regular filesharing instead

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description of vmx-parameters:

VMware-liveCD:

[fcpk]

Mostly because regular filesharing means either samba or nfs and that:

1.windows' samba/cifs server does not follow the vista/2k8 symlinks properly, meaning that most of my normal symlinked folders can not be transparently mapped

2.windows' nfs server does not support unicode, hence breaks everything.

If you have other suggestions I'd be glad to hear about them.

25MB/s is not horribly slow, but I thought there might be a way to make it better.

[Scissor]

I also recommend not using Shared Folders, but if you still want to try.... on the Host Network Card properties, try temporarily disabling any "LSO", "Large Send Offload", and/or "Task Offload" settings to see if they make a difference.

[fcpk]

I tried but I dont think it helped.

Why would shared folders actually go through the host network card?

In any case I'm roughly getting 50% of the max disk speed, which is quite acceptable so I guess I'll content myself with that.

I trial'ed about half a dozen commercial nfs servers and none could really behave properly(ie be fast, follow windows symlinks, and support unicode). smb does not look like it's getting smb2 symlinks(client side) support any time soon so normal SMB is out too.

I guess I 'll be stuck with shared folders for a while.

Are there specific options in the linux mounting of hgfs that could change something?

[fcpk]

In case this interests anyone:

Idea: sharing a windows vmware's host drives in a linux vm with full support for unicode and vista symlinks(unsupported by any smb client but windows')

The best solution I could find after trying about a dozen nfs servers, sftp servers and modifying vmhgfs was actually installing cygwin 1.7,

installing it's sshd+sftp server, and using sshfs in the vm to share through an internal network the data.

Practically, ssh meant encryption so I patched ssh&sshd on both cygwin and the guest to allow for no encryption.

The result is that "dd if=/dev/zero|ssh host dd off=/dev/null" gives about 90MB/s(cpu bound)

The sshfs itself "dd if=/dev/zero of=/mnt/sshfs/testfile" gives about 50MB/s, which is fairly reasonnable considering it's writing through a network.

Another benefit of using sshfs+cygwin is that file operations are properly atomic, and svn or any other tools that does very quick file moves/deletes will not fail like with hgfs(shared folders).

Here is my optimal fstab line as I could finally get it best:

sshfs#fcpk@host:/ /mnt/sshfs fuse reconnect,compression=no,max_read=8192,max_write=8192,direct_io,ciphers=none 0 0

[continuum]

Interesting stuff - do you know about any HowTo that explains how to setup sshfs on Windows ?

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description of vmx-parameters:

VMware-liveCD:

[fcpk]

actually sshfs(a fuse mount) is for the guest(linux)

The host is windows in my case, and uses cygwin 1.7's sshd as server.

I've now patched openssh to not use hmac to make things a tad faster and I'm getting a few percent boost since everything's cpu bound.(by ssh in the vm)

There's probably some more optimization that can be done but for now I'm fairly content.

[nextech]

FCPK,

I had a similar problem with slow shared folders, I posted the solution to this problem here:

http://communities.vmware.com/message/1191790#1191790

I hope this helps, I believe this should solve your problem. Please close this thread out, and mark it as "Answered" and If you find

this answer helpful, please do take the time to award me the "Correct Answer" points.

Thank-you!

Mark