[SOLVED] Stunning slow mounting of drive letters TIB mounter via SMB network
ATIH 2016 b5636
Mounting drive letters of TIB Images over network takes more than 2 minutes. Now I can also reproduce this with backup files that were created with Acronis b5620
There is no relevant network load caused by Acronis but it seems like ATIH is reading the whole file from the remote with a speed of just 30-40 Mbit/s.
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screenshot_167.png | 159.92 KB |

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Hello Dmitry,
I am using ATIH for a long time now and I think I can recall that mounting a tib file would take just a few seconds. Now it seems he is really transferring the whole tib file and cache it before mounting.
Please also have a look into this thread, which handles long mounting times from a local device (SATA 3/ SSD).
https://forum.acronis.com/de/node/97170
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Alright, I have performed some tests to check this scenario.
I have not observed any signifficant difference in performance between True Image 2015 and True Image 2016. In fact, I saw a slight improvement in mount time when using True Image 2016. I have tested this with a network share (over a 100 Mbps connection) and a USB-connected external disk.
When mounting a 21 GB archive created in True Image 2015 (build 6525):
Network share (SMB) | External disk (USB) | |
---|---|---|
True Image 2015 (build 6525) | 55 sec. | 30 sec. |
True Image 2016 (build 5634) | 45 sec. | 27 sec. |
When mounting a 21 GB archive created in True Image 2016 (build 5634):
Network share (SMB) | External disk (USB) | |
---|---|---|
True Image 2015 (build 6525) | - | - |
True Image 2016 (build 5634) | 50 sec. | 27 sec. |
The only way I could reproduce what you describe as "mounting a tib file would take just a few seconds" is when I mount some backup, then unmount it and then mount it once again. The second time it is mounted significantly faster due to the Windows File Caching mechanism.
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Hello Dmitry,
thank you for spending your time on the problem. I believe in your results and still wonder why it am so convinced about it was faster in the past. I will elaborate this scenario again.
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Here are the results of my tests when mounting a 29GB archive from a USB 2.0 connected HDD on an older computer used primarily for testing that dual boots Windows 8.1 and Windows 10. I don't have any Acronis products installed on any of my new UEFI computers.
Mounting the archive on Windows 8.1 with True Image 2015 final build processed in 8 seconds.
Mounting the archive on Windows 10 with True Image 2016 latest build processed in 62 seconds.
The folowing attachments were created using Steps Recorder to show the time stamps of when the archive mounting started and finished.
Edited.
I mounted a comparable archive created using an alternative disk imaging program on Windows 10 and the results were consistant with that of 2015 on Windows 8.1.
Attachment | Size |
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307173-123415.zip | 160.71 KB |
307173-123418.zip | 144.96 KB |
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@Joey Do I understand correctly that you also see there is a difference of mounting times, in this case depending the OS?
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Karl,
I performed a couple more tests.
Mounting the archive on Windows 10 with 2015 processed in 7 seconds.
Mounting the archive on Windows 7 with 2016 processed in 10 seconds.
These tests were all perfomed using the same hardware. It looks like the extended mount times only occur with 2016 on Windows 10.
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Ok thanks a lot for your investigation and time spent. I hope I can find some time to make more precise tests, but to be honest I am currently very overloaded with work.
At least your investigations give me some hope there is a different behaviour. Foremost I need to find archives I have created with older versions of Acronis which I found to mount faster in general.
@Dmitry would you think it is a fair condition to test this in VMs? In this case I could make some SSD based VMs using Hyper V on Windows 10 and test the behaviour with different ATIH versions and also OS versions. If say it is better to test this on a bare metal system let me know.
Would be nice if you can give me a seperate key for this tests and revoke it after we are done.
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Acronis made a fundamental change to image mounting in TI 2016. In prior versions, a mounting device was created in Device Manager. This device (or its driver) would not continue to work when a system was upgraded to a later version of Windows. The same thing would happen to any system if Microsoft sysprep was used on the system. You had to reinstall TI after the upgrade to get image mounting to work. To solve this problem, TI 2016 no longer creates a device in Device Manager. This change may or may not play a role in the different mounting times you are experiencing.
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I agree and I welcome the changes made to the mounting service, as I personally lined out future in the thread about Windows 10 and the ATIH 2016 beta livecast that this behaviour will inflict with the WaaS methodolgy so I am pretty fine that Acronis made this fundamental change with a later ATIH 2016 release.
The TH2 release of Windows 10 is currently reported not be an inplace upgrade this time but will be rather delivered as cumulative Windows Update like the other ones of the past months but I am still sure that sooner or later MS will roll out inplace upgrades and release changes so we would have seen problems with ATIH, and the old method.
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The situation has become much better
transfer speed from SSD via SMB is very varying from 200-500 Mbit and basically aid up this topic
https://forum.acronis.com/de/node/99462
but it is not taking minutes anymore. Especially the window where the user can select the drives to mount takes only few seconds to load after the UAC. I will mark this as solved however.
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