The FlexTk file management toolkit is fully optimized for modern multi-CPU/multi-core systems, capable of effectively
utilizing Gigabit Ethernet links, hardware RAID controllers and multiple physical disk drives and delivers a very good
performance in file copy, file synchronization and data migration operations on Windows-based platforms.
Now, as there is a newly released version of FlexTk for numerous Linux-based operating systems, let's see how FlexTk's
performance compares to native Linux tools such as CP and RSYNC. CP is a small Linux utility intended to perform regular
file copy operations, while RSYNC is a much more flexible and widely used Linux tool capable of synchronizing files between
local and remote file systems.
In order to accurately measure performance of these tools, multiple tests were performed on two identical host computers
connected through a pair or Intel's Gigabit Ethernet NICs. Each test computer was equipped with a Q9650 quad-core CPU,
4 GB of system memory, two 10K RPM WD Raptor disk drives (system and data) and running the CentOS Linux v5.3 (64-Bit)
operating system. All tests were performed using a mixed 4GB set of files including 10,000 small files, 1,000 medium-sized
files and 100 large files. Finally, in order to minimize influence of the file system cache, both test computers were
rebooted before each benchmark.
All tools were tested using the same data set in three different configurations including disk-to-disk file copy/synchronization,
file copy/synchronization over the network using the SAMBA/CIFS protocol and file copy/synchronization over the network using
the NFS network file sharing protocol. For disk-to-disk tests all operations were performed from one physical disk to another
connected to the same host computer. All networked tests were performed from one computer to another through the network with
the first computer acting as a server and the second one as a client.
Surprisingly, but as it is clear from the average results graph, the much simpler Linux CP tool performs better than the well
known Linux RSYNC tool in all tests including networked configurations were RSYNC is supposed to be the best one. In all tests
FlexTk was executed in the multi-stream file synchronization mode deploying multiple, asynchronous I/O streams what finally
have resulted in a significantly better performance especially for networked file copy, file synchronization and data migration
operations.
* This performance review has been prepared for information purposes only and we are strongly advise
you to make your own performance evaluations using your specific hardware components and datasets.
