File Synchronization Performance

The main purpose of the performance review is to provide our customers with an estimate of performance and an expected scalability level of FlexTk's built-in file synchronization engine on different hardware configurations and data sets. In addition, we have compared DiskBoss v1.4.20 to other popular file synchronization solutions such as Microsoft's SyncToy v2.0, GoodSync v7.5.5 and ViceVersa v2.0.

As it is shown on the average results graph, FlexTk is capable of synchronizing files at a speed of 220 Files/Sec on average, GoodSync is on the second place with 192 Files/Sec, ViceVersa is on the third place with 142 Files/Sec and Microsoft's SyncToy is the last with 93 Files/Sec only.

FlexTk's file synchronization engine is optimized for multi-core/multi-CPU computers and advanced RAID storage systems and capable of synchronizing millions of files very fast and effectively. In order to accurately measure the performance of all the selected file synchronization tools, all tests were performed on the following hardware configurations:

  • RAID0-To-RAID0 File Synchronization (4x WD Raptor, ICH9R)
  • File Synchronization over Network (2x WD Raptor, Intel Gigabit Ethernet)
  • Disk-To-USB File Synchronization (WD Raptor to WD500 USB Disk)

All tests were performed on a powerful PC machine equipped with a Q9450 Quad-Core CPU, 4 GB of system memory and running the Windows XP SP3 32-Bit operating system. File synchronization over network was performed from the test machine to a powerful NAS server interconnected through a pair of Intel's Gigabit Ethernet NICs.

It is a well known fact that the performance of file synchronization operations (and file copy operations) highly depends on the size of files that should be synchronized. It is relatively easy to achieve a good level of performance on a small number of medium-sized or large files, but the situation changes dramatically when you need to synchronize large amounts of files with a significant percentage of small-sized files. In order to measure a statistically representative level of file synchronization performance, we have prepared a highly diversified file set containing 50,000 (1.5 GB) files including:

  • 500 MB of small files (0-50K)
  • 500 MB of medium-sized files (50K-1M)
  • 500 MB of large files (1M-50M)

Each file synchronization tool was executed on all hardware configurations using the same file set. In order to completely eliminate OS file caching effects, the test machine (and the NAS server during network tests) was rebooted after each benchmark. Individual benchmark results from all three different hardware configurations were averaged and finally four graphs (average and three hardware setups) representing all the performance results were prepared.

* This performance review has been prepared for information purposes only and we are strongly advise you to make your own performance evaluations using your specific hardware components and datasets.