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Performance benefits of Multithread Robocopy

Robocopy (“robust file copy”), included with Windows operating systems, is a rich file copy utility with many options. Note that the syntax for Robocopy is different than the COPY or XCOPY commands. To get started with robocopy, open a command prompt and enter: robocopy.

For this presentation we compared the results with and without the multithread option: robocopy /MT. Using the multithread option in most cases results in faster or significantly faster file copy operations than without the multithread option. The multithread option was introduced in Windows 7 and Windows Server 2008 R2. When using the multithread option, the thread count can be 1 – 128, with a default of 8 threads. Robocopy takes advantage of Server Message Block (SMB) version 2.1, a file and print services network protocol, also sometimes known as CIFS. For additional detail on SMB 2.1 see: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ff625695(WS.10).aspx.

For the tests shown in the presentation, we used two relatively new servers running Windows Server 2008 R2 and did local disk-to-disk (array) copies and copies across the network, using 1GbE and 10GbE infrastructure. We used three sets of files in these robocopy tests:

• Website folder of 38.7GB, 1.5 million files
• ISO file folder of 59.2GB, 215 files
• Video folder of 218.9GB, 1 file

View the March 2011 RMWTUG Robocopy Multithread presentation, which includes the test descriptions, hardware configurations and results graphs, including bytes/sec and time to completion.

Look for more detailed test results to follow in an upcoming Demartek Robocopy Multithread report.

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