I’ve been noticing a behaviour of the Deadline Monitor ever since using it: whewaking up machines through the right-click menu remote cotrol / machine / start machine it takes considerably longer (many seconds) on Windows 7 until the message window pops up than on Windows XP where it’s basically happening instantly. I’ve observed this on several machines so can say prezty reliably that it’s OS-related. It also seems that the more machines to be woken up are selected the longer the time until the message window pops up. Not a big deal though, just a bit annoying.
Cheers,
Holger
The WOL operation is currently synchronous, so the message doesn’t popup until the WOL message has been sent to each machine. I’m guessing that on the Win7 machine, it takes slightly longer to resolve the remote end point than on the XP machine, which ends up in the longer delay before the message pops up.
Cheers,
Ryan
I see. Don’t understand though why this is so much different on the different OS versions. This is nothing that’s got to do with DNS and is just a broadcast, right? Just wondering if there’s anything we might be able to tweak network-wise that speeds this up on the Win7 machines (which is the vast majority of systems here).
I took another look at the code, and we gather all the local endpoints, and send the broadcast from each one, so maybe there are more local endpoints on the Win7 machines than the XP one?
We do this because there can be cases where the machine has multiple local endpoints, and sending the broadcast only works from certain ones.
Are you talking about network devices in Windows? If so, then the answer is yes. The machines i’m talking about do have usually two ethernet ports, sometimes Bluetooth and some of them 2 to 3 VirtualBox devices. I guess that explains it then.
Thanks!
Yup, that’s what I was referring to, so yeah, I’m sure that explains it.
Cheers,
Ryan
Update: i just checked the WinXP machine and it also has 5 network devices. But on that machine the window really pops up in a fraction of a second compared to several seconds on Win7. I also don’t really remember any such delays with the WOL tools we were using before installing Deadline. Is there maybe a way you guys can check which Windows network interface is on the same network as the Slaves that are to be woken up and only send the broadcast from that one? As i said before, his is not a big issue but just a small annoyance though.
Cheers,
Holger
We could just make the process asynchronous and show the popup immediately. With the current method, the popup simply gets displayed after everything has been sent (there’s no way to confirm if they’ve been received), so displaying it immediately instead while sending the messages in the background really isn’t any different.
How does that sound?
Cheers,
Ryan
To me, this sounds absolutely perfect. Not sure if the whole world agrees, but i’d prefer this to be honest.
Cheers,
Holger
Cool. We’ll throw it on the wishlist list. It’s probably something we could do for 7.1.
Cheers,
Ryan