Thread Info
  • State Not Answered
  • Locked Locked
  • Replies 12 replies
  • Subscribers 1 subscriber
  • Views 4179 views
  • Users 0 members are here
Options
Suggested
This discussion has been locked.
You can no longer post new replies to this discussion. If you have a question you can start a new discussion

Disk fragmentation

MawfTech

Why does Sophos AU cause so much fragmentation?

Each minor update downloads but a few KB however every time there's something to do, the entire SAV package is copied (that's > 70Mb's), the new IDE is then integrated and then this entire package is copied back again. This huge > 140MB copy which occurs several times a day is destroying small disk partitions causing machines to grind to a halt during the update cycle.

I'm pretty sure we've all experienced this slowdown and it's time to start making Sophos aware of this so we get a change. It makes no sense at all to copy the entire installation folder each time there's an update. It makes no sense to copy it again once the IDE's added. The process should happen in-place i.e.. checksum the install folder and integrate the update directly. Don't copy the folder. This way, we dramatically reduce fragmentation and speed up the whole update process.

I've got users with typically < 60% disk usage so 'ideal' and plenty of RAM. Give them 3 weeks and the machine always says 'you should defragment this volume' and it's always because the Sophos updates. Anyone else out there have users groaning every five minutes that they can't look at the screen at the moment 'cause Sophos is updating. Now you know why!

Matt

:1720


This thread was automatically locked due to age.
Parents
  • 0

    As a general policy the update systems used by Sophos have reliability and security as the highest priorities. Performance is usually good enough for our customers, but we're looking at a wide variety of ways we can improve performance without compromising on the functionality.

    For instance, in some cases where it makes sense, SUM uses hard links rather than file copies, which avoids duplicating the data on disk (which can increase fragmentation). This is somethings we are looking at adding to AutoUpdate.

    Cheers,

    John Reynolds

    :1791
Reply
  • 0

    As a general policy the update systems used by Sophos have reliability and security as the highest priorities. Performance is usually good enough for our customers, but we're looking at a wide variety of ways we can improve performance without compromising on the functionality.

    For instance, in some cases where it makes sense, SUM uses hard links rather than file copies, which avoids duplicating the data on disk (which can increase fragmentation). This is somethings we are looking at adding to AutoUpdate.

    Cheers,

    John Reynolds

    :1791
Children
No Data
Unfiltered HTML