I've noticed lately that our Unity seems slow, not neccesarily in MC but in Windows Explorer when I browse workspaces and folders. Some of the other folks here have also noticed this.  We have one workspace named Resources that contains graphics, fonts, settings etc that everyone uses. This currently contains 12016 files according to Unity's Admin Tool. Is this a problem? I'm trying to eliminate all possible causes and find a solution.

Unity MediaNet 5.0.1, MC 3.5.9 on all clients. Fibre channel.

I think you should store your native files (targa, jpeg, qt, dv, mov, ttf, etc...) on a separeted NAS. I don't allow saving this type of files in our Avid Unity. Only mediafiles and project files, nothing else! Telling the truth I wrote a program, which deletes everything except *.mxf, *.pmr, *. mdb, and the project files in every 30 minutes. I'm a strict administrator ;) My second rule is: a subdirectory of \Avid MediaFiles\MXF\ can contains maximum 2-3000 mediafiles.

Hi,

the maximum File-Count allowed on a workspace depends on the size of the workspace and on the total number of workspaces in your allocationgroup! But 12000 files is kinda nothing....

I do not allow workspaces bigger than 1 TB, it's much better  to have multiple workspaces when a project becomes bigger.

And this is the best way to keep the performance up, as windows 32bit  is not too happy with drives larger than 2 TB.

Further you should check how many allocationgroups you have on your chassis, more allocationgroups -> less performance.

I recommend at least 2 complete chassis for one allocationgroup, if you have just 1 chassis you should only build 1 allocationgroup.

And you should not exceed 95% drive-usage, then unity starts slowing down. (well, other storages such as Terrablock start slowing down at 75% driveusage.....)

Check your individual drive usage in the Monitor-Tool, the percentage of used disk space should be +-1% equal on all drives.

If not run a synchronize!

And last but not least: if you have a Protools' storage running on the Unity... Kick it out, it's the number one performance-killer as it usually needs its own allocationgroup with at least 8 drives in it.

I hope I could help,

Chris

Thanks for you input Chris.  Sounds like its time to syncronize here, currently I'm OK on all the other points. I'd hate to remove the stuff we have in that communal workspace because it's data we all use every day.