What configuration results in the best performance?

[caruk]

Hello and congrats on the fantastic use of the Bit Torrent technology... Really really cool and very easy to use.

I have a question about performance. If I have a directory with 5 subdirectories inside that I want to share but it is quite large... beyond the benefit of being able to share subdirectories with different people is there any performance penalty in configuring 5 separate (sub)folders rather then the single top level folder? In other words is it better to spread synchronization across 5 folders or is it better to have 1 VERY large folder to sync.

Thank you

Chris

[Varnagas]

Hey Chris

I happen to have some experience on the topic over the course of last weekend. For the sake of performance I may point out few things I found out:

• Adding, re-adding, managing one folder overall is way better "performance" toward use-friendliness.
  
• Indexing folders are not simultaneous among separate shared folders.
  
• Sync is not simultaneous among share's sub-folders, as it syncs them step-by-step by alphabet (?).
  
• Sync is simultaneous among separate shares, so while it may not result in faster sync, changes appear and are distributed more widely per shorted period of time.
  
• When lan encryption is off, speeds are higher on slow machines (in the same lan of course).
  

If you have set up where huge file changes happen on sub-share "A" and small files are changed/generated on sub-share "Z" and you need to receive updates of "Z" fast, you won't, as sub-share "A" will have to be synced all the way first and only then will it pick up syncing "Z" after anything in between. So unless you have somewhat similar setup to this example and you wont have to split up one share to more than 5, it might be worth performance-wise.

Other than that I'd suggest having just up to 5 shares to manage, better performance on your mind