Offline (unmoveable) files possibly causing high memory usage

[zaleksf]

I'm a new MyDefrag user, and now I love it.

However, I recently had to make a change to a set of offline files stored on my system; I had difficulty using MyDefrag while having a large number of offline files stored in the cache (c:\windows\csc\ directory).

These files are considered unmoveable. When these files were on my system I could not complete a defrag with LowerMemoryUsage = No, and I could not complete a Slow Optimization in any case. System memory for MyDefrag would start low (~250MB) and eventually grow to 2,000MB+ (with most growth at the end of Zone 2/5 of FastOpt) and then freeze the app. The defrag times would also be very long (5 hrs for FastOptimization).

I have removed the local/cached copy of my offline files and I now can perform a FastOptimization with total MyDefrag memory of less than 300MB using LowerMemoryUsage = No. The script runs quickly now; less than an hour (my system: Dell Inspiron 1420, dual core processor, 4GB RAM, 320GB HD w/ 180GB partition for Vista, approx half full of data).

I plan on restoring the offline folder cache after the FastOptimization and hopefully all the files are kept together in a "nice" place. And I hope to find a FileSelect boolean that tells MyDefrag to ignore them (possibly the FileBoolean FullPath = "C:\windows\CSC"; DirectoryName("CSC") didn't seem to help).

I believe the standard scripts struggle with the offline files in the c:\windos\csc\ folder, possibly due to their status.

Hope this helps.

[jeroen]

Yes, there is something happening with offline files. See this thread for more information. Somebody else has reported that adding the following line to the beginning of his script helped a lot:

Code:

ExcludeFiles(Offline(yes))

I ask you the same questions I asked him: Were you online or offline at the time? If the exclude is not in the Settings.MyD then does it help to be online or offline? I see a service called "Offline Files" in the service manager, does it help to turn that off just before running MyDefrag? On the internet I see that offline files are stored in a folder called "C:\Windows\CSC", was MyDefrag slow on that folder or somewhere else? And on which Windows are you, XP, Vista, what?

[cg]

I can tell you when I was having the problem with CSC files under EFS, it didn't matter whether I was connected to the network or running in offline mode - the problem was the same.

I will try to add that exclusion tomorrow.  I did something similar before and it didn't work, but I don't think it was that command.

In any case, didn't you say in another post that you were going to change the way MyDefrag opens files to do the same as how JKDefrag works?  That seemed to make encrypted files movable.  And its probably why I didn't have any problems with JKDefrag moving those files.

[zaleksf]

I have run MyDefrag-4.1.1 both with the offline cache (c:\windows\CSC) installed and without, and have had significantly different results. Within this cache I had approximately 6GB data, 20k files in 1300 folders. I conducted all of the defrags offline - not connected the network, but I still had the ExcludeFiles(Offline(yes)) switch installed.

General feedback:
SlowOptimize.MyD with offline cache and LowerMemoryUsage(no) => not good; ran out of mem at 2GB+

SlowOptimize.MyD without offline cache and LowerMemoryUsage(no) => ran! Then I reinstalled the cache files, and saw that they muck-up the nice work done by MyDefrag and will be "in the way" for further routine maintenance (FastUpdate).

SlowOptimize_mod.MyD with offline cache and LowerMemoryUsage(no) => ran! but slowly. And I think I just got lucky that I didn't run out of memory (used 1.8GB+). The MyDefrag.Dat file was large at ~4500+ files to be excluded. It seemed to take a while for the MyDefrag.dat file to be built properly(??). Previously, when this file had fewer files listed I noticed that the defrag algorithm had to do a lot of work dealing with an unmoveable file before moving on; memory usage seemed to grow rapidly during these times. I had also modified the SlowOptimize script to skip over the "CSC" related files every way I could think of: "... and not(DirectoryName("CSC"))", "...and not(FullPath("c:\windows\CSC"))", etc.

SlowOptimize.MyD with previously cached files, but not in CSC cache, and LowerMemoryUsage(no) => runs fast! I simply store all the files on my system now and back them up to another computer's drive using Vista's robocopy, instead of using the offline cache system. Now all is well, using the standard .MyD scripts. The offline cache was nice in some ways, but it also caused other issues such as not being able to perform compiling on a project in the cache (the compiler paths seem to get confused with the drive mappings).

I think looking in to the offline cache issues may be worthwhile.

Keep up the good work.

 

[jeroen]

Thank you very much for all your detective work, I appreciate it!

I conducted all of the defrags offline

It would be very interesting to know if the offline files are also slow to defragment when online.

ran! but slowly.

Was it slow because there was a lot of work to be done, or was it slow during a particular action (for example when the display showed "SortBy")? Do I understand you correctly that you did this test WITH the "ExcludeFiles(Offline(yes))" command? The command causes all the offline files to be marked as unmovable, so the program will need a lot of time to process the list of unmovable files, this is normal.