NTFS compression on Data folder

[GlenM]

We are currently using VSS with about 75 users. Our Data folder's size is ~
7GB. We are still using the version 5 database format (we are planning to
upgrade to the version 6 database format in the near future to take
advantage of the performance improvements).

I'm wondering if applying NTFS compression to the Data folder is
recommended - i.e. would we expect to see a performance increase or
decrease by doing this? (Space is not really an issue on the server ... I'm
thinking strictly in terms of performance.)

The reason I ask is because we have seen a decrease in build times on some
developer workstations by applying NTFS compression. It seems that the
extra overhead in doing the decompression is more than compensated for by
the reduced time required to read the smaller amount of data from disk.
Could we expect a similar benefit by applying compression to our VSS data
folder?

Our file server (I think) is a dual 800MHz with U320 SCSI RAID5 drives.

Also ... what exactly does "analyze -C" do? The documentation is a little
vague on details.

Thanks.

Glen Miller
EISI

glen dot miller at naviplan dot nut (replace dot nut with dot com)

[Somchai U.]

If you compress the SS database, I think there is no performace gain. In
fact, it can be slower. The compressed files cause high CPU usage on file
server side. This may cause decrease performace. (NTFS compression is bad on
writing performance.) Although the compressed files may reduce harddisk
I/O, I think your harddisk is already fast enough. In your case, the
performance gain on harddisk I/O is lower than performance drop on CPU usage
for compression/decompression.

However, I do not know if any whitepaper about NTFS compression with
sourcesafe.

Somchai

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