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ralish
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Improvement: Highly inefficient guest to host copy

When copying files from the guest to the host with VMware Tools (not using SMB, FTP, etc ...) the mechanism is very inefficient.

Consider the following scenario assuming a 10GB file to be copied from the guest to the host:

  1. VMware Workstation copies the file from the guest to a temporary location on the host system.
  2. Windows Explorer *copies* the file from the temporary location to the desired location on the host.

Assuming the destination location is on the same volume as the temporary location twice as much storage space as should be needed is used. In addition, the temporary file is not removed, so the wasted storage space is retained indefinitely until a background process performs clean-up of temporary files. For large files, this process means the copy takes around twice as long as should be required given the redundant second step.

I'd suggest the following changes:

  1. Where the destination location resides on the same volume as the temporary storage location a move should be performed resulting in no wasted space and a halving of time required.
  2. If the destination location resides on a different volume from the temporary storage location, the data should be removed from the temporary location after the copy is completed.
  3. Ideally the file should be directly copied to the destination location instead of using an intermediate temporary location but I expect there are additional factors here. The above suggested improvements should apply to the vast majority of copy operations while being relatively simple to implement?

All testing performed on Windows 10 v1903 x64 w/ VMware Workstation v15.5.0.

Thanks in advance.

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continuum
Immortal
Immortal

Please forgive my stupid question ...

Why do you prefer to use vmware-tools copy when you can use reliable standard procedures like SMB, SCP or FTP ?

I would not even consider to use vmware-tools copy for files with a 10gb size ....


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ralish
Enthusiast
Enthusiast

Sorry for the delayed response! I thought I had subscribed to notifications on this thread.

It's not a stupid question at all. The answer is that there are some cases where transferring a file to/from a VM is desired but it deliberately doesn't have a network connection, or is on a network segment which is inaccessible from the host. The 10GB size was just an example, and of course at the more extreme end. Regardless, it appears there's some "low-hanging fruit" in the handling of the VMware Tools copy support which would result in a substantial performance increase in such scenarios.

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