[OpenAFS] AFS and PhotoShop interaction?

Mike Polek mike@pictage.com
Tue, 07 Nov 2006 14:56:58 -0800


Jeffrey Altman wrote:

>>>I'd suggest trying the 1.5.10 client.
>>
>>I have a couple people with 1.5.10 clients installed, and they
>>experience the same behavior. I am now borrowing a WinXP box
>>and it's sitting on my desk. I experience the same behavior.
> 
> 
> Follow the directions in the release notes for capturing log data
> with the SysInternals FileMon and DbgView tools.  FileMon will
> show what operations the applications are requesting.  DbgView
> will capture what OpenAFS is doing in response.  Set both tools
> to capture with millisecond clock time and the logs can be
> examined in lock step.
> 
> Send a bug report with the logs to openafs-bugs@openafs.org.
> 
> Jeffrey Altman

Ok... I've been using Filemon, and it's giving very enlightening
information. I'm a bit loathe to open an afs bug report, because
I'm now convinced it has little to do with AFS, except that
the paths are kinda deep because of the way the tree is set up,
which makes all those OPEN DIR calls take longer as it traverses,
and maybe there's an issue with the amount of time it takes for
QUERY INFORMATION to complete. Is there an equivalent of "fakestat"
for the windows client? I think that's only for things crossing
cell boundaries... but anyway... in case anyone is interested...

I was using Photoshop CS2 9.0. I'm upgrading to 9.0.2 now just in case.
What appears to be happening is that when I want to open a file,
Photoshop decides that it must get a status on every file
I've opened since I started the program... twice....

So, for example, if I opened files A.jpg, B.jpg and C.jpg in
C:\TEMP, and then I open D, E and F.jpg on my desktop, and
then I open H:\mycell.com\assets\images\*.jpg by dragging,
say 10 jpg images in.... then I want to open a file
C:\myimg.jpg.

In Filemon, I see photoshop open and read myimg.jpg. And then,
stat a lot of files... It opens each piece of the directory path
to A.jpg, and then does a QUERY INFORMATION on A.jpg... then each
piece of the directory path to B.jpg, then QUERY INFORMATION on B.jpg,
etc. This goes for every file I've opened recently, so it hits
AFS as well, and afsd_service.exe uses up about 50% of the cpu.
Then, it starts all over again my doing a bunch of alternate
READ and QUERY INFORMATION calls on myimg.jpg, and then repeats
all the other stuff starting with A.jpg and does the QUERY
INFORMATION calls for all of the files again.  It looks like
it does a QI on the last 30 files opened.

If I open 30 files off the hard drive, then open more files, it works
ok. If I open 30 files out of AFS, it slows down with each open.
If there is a way to tune the AFS client to speed up the time
it takes to return the information Photoshop is requesting,
please let me know what that is.

I'm going to open a ticket with Photoshop support to see if there
is a way to get it to stop doing what it's doing. The open file
history survives reboots. So the only way to clear it seems to
be to open 30 small local files. I am NOT going to tell my users
that. ;-)

Thanks to everyone for the help and suggestions. Let me know
any tuning suggestions to speed up the QUERY INFORMATION calls.

Mike P.

P.S. Jeffrey-- if you still want filemon logs for any reason, let me know.
      Seemed like it would just be chaff in the queue at this point...