Setup guide

For example, suppose you have a SAN mounted as “/CXFS1” on your Flame workstation (flame1). A Windows
PC (windows1) will mount the SAN as “N:\”. The path translation file contains the following entries:
<map src_host=“flame1” src_path=“/CXFS1”
dst_host=“windows1” dst_path=“N:\”>
From the workstation, open a new terminal and type:
./sw_wiretap_translate_path -h flame1 -p /CXFS1/myclips -H windows1
The result should return the value of the destination path, which represents how “windows1” will
mount“/CXFS1” on “flame1”.
N:\myclips
NOTE If the result returns the value of the source path, the translation database entry was not successfully applied.
Standard filesystem maintenance
Performance of a filesystem depends on a number of factors, including the following:
■ Hardware and operating system
■ Fragmentation. Fragmentation is a phenomenon that consists of a file being broken into several blocks,
which are stored in non-contiguous sectors on the disk. This decreases filesystem performance, as it takes
a lot of time to retrieve and reassemble the scattered pieces of the file before making it usable.
■ I/O sizes
■ Filesystem and tuning parameters. Standard filesystems tuned for a specific file format can under-perform
for other file formats. For instance, a filesystem optimized and capable of delivering real-time performance
for 2K 10-bit DPX files delivers lower real-time performance for SD media.
■ Free space available and fill rate
■ Locality of reference. This principle states that files used in the context of the same application or
procedure (for example, consecutive frames in a timeline) should be as close to each other as possible
on the disk, in order to minimize seek times between two successive I/O operations. Locality of reference
is good in the case of frames written on an empty partition, and decreases as the filesystem fills up and
becomes fragmented.
■ Concurrent I/O and metadata operations
■ Number of I/O threads and processes in use at a given time. Multi-threaded I/O is the use of multiple
parallel I/O threads within a disk read process. This method allows the RAID array to optimize the fetching
of multiple blocks of data.
Control fragmentation
Filesystem fragmentation is directly related to the amount of mixing and interleaving of blocks of data of
different sizes, and is aggravated by multiple I/O clients concurrently writing data to the partition.
Although some standard filesystems (such as XFS) feature advanced space allocation techniques, which make
them more resistant to fragmentation, this problem still occurs as the filesystem's free space decreases and
frequent file deletion, creation, and resizing operations take place.
Here are some steps you can take to counter filesystem fragmentation:
■ Avoid storing mixed resolution projects on a standard filesystem partition. Workflows where many
different media formats are used simultaneously tend to become fragmented more rapidly than if a single
resolution media format is used consistently.
64 | Chapter 6 Software configuration