RE: Slowdown in loading file over network drive

["Lester C. Smalley" <lsmalley@xxxxxxxxxxx>]

On Sunday, June 15, 2003 21:59, Fred Ma [fma@doe.carleton.ca] wrote:

I've got a 2.75MB doc file in a book, on a solaris account.  If I open
it using FM running on solaris, it takes a second or two.  If I copy it
to a PC account and load it with FM running on PC, it takes a second or
two.  If I map the solaris directory to a PC drive as a network drive,
and copy it from solaris to PC, it takes a second or two.

However, if I run FM on PC and load it from solaris over the network
drive, it takes several minutes. Is there anything I can do with FM
configurations to avoid this?

Thanks.
------
Fred,

no, not really.  The best answer is to have the file(s) on a local drive if at all possible.

Understand that what you are asking by opening the file over the network is to have FM create all it's temporary files (.lck, .auto, etc.) on the remote drive.  Even on the best behaved (and lightly loaded) networks, there will be noticeable overhead in this sort of thing.

The copy operation from Solaris to PC is relatively quick because there is no interpretation of the file content, but opening the file requires some sanity checking at least by FM of the content.

If the file is 2.75 MB because of embedded graphics (imported by copy and not by reference) the network transfer and interpretation by FM time will become an even larger factor.  Unless there is some driving need to ensure the file is "self-contained", importing graphics by reference is generally preferred.

If you can have the graphics locally but the FM file stored on the network the file may open much more quickly, but this will probably cause _many_ path problems and ultimately is not a good solution.  

If the need is to keep the local PC and Solaris network copies of the file in sync, you may have to institute a manual workflow to copy the file down to open it, and copy back to close it.  This is probably automatable, but I leave that to you as there are many possible means to this that depend on your exact set of tools and utilities available.

-- Lester
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 Lester C. Smalley              Email: lsmalley@infocon.com
 Information Consultants, Inc.  Phone: 302-239-2942 FAX: 302-239-1712
 Hockessin, DE  USA  19707      WWWeb: http://www.infocon.com/
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