I thought User Share data was cached by unRAID so that shares could be browsed by clients without having to spin up the drives until files actually needed to be read?

 

Or does Vista, when exploring, read properties not handled by unRAID?

Here's a good place to talk about some linux tunables.  There is a file in the running system called:

 

/etc/sysctl.conf

 

This file defines a number of tunable parameters for many subsystems such as the tcp/ip layer, and for our purposes here, the vm layer.  (Actually most the variables listed under /proc/sys may be changed.  If you google "linux sysctl.conf" you will find many other tunables.)

 

For current discussion, we are interested in the "vfs_cache_pressure" tunable.  The description of this tunable is:

 

Controls the tendency of the kernel to reclaim the memory which is used for caching of directory and inode objects. At the default value of vfs_cache_pressure=100 the kernel will attempt to reclaim dentries and inodes at a "fair" rate with respect to pagecache and swapcache reclaim.  Decreasing vfs_cache_pressure causes the kernel to prefer to retain dentry and inode caches.  Increasing vfs_cache_pressure beyond 100 causes the kernel to prefer to reclaim dentries and inodes.

 

You will notice that we changed this value from 100 to 10 in an effort to retain directory information for disks so that they won't spin up during browsing.  For the most part, this work ok, but it's not always effective as aaron330i has discovered.

 

To experiment with different settings in this file, copy the original onto your Flash, e.g., from telnet or console:

 

cp /etc/sysctl.conf /boot

 

Then edit the file /boot/sysctl.conf and type this:

 

sysctl -p /boot/sysctl.conf

 

If you want the settings to be restored every time you re-boot, you cat put the above command at the top of your 'go' script.  Most variables changed by sysctl command do not require re-boot to be effective.

 

You might want to consider even lower values of 'vfs_cache_pressure", including 0 to see what happens

 

References:

- sysctl man page

- /proc/sys documentation

- (attached) the default unRAID OS /etc/sysctl.conf file

s'more interesting reading.

http://rudd-o.com/archives/2007/10/02/tales-from-responsivenessland-why-linux-feels-slow-and-how-to-fix-that/

 

I set up this line in my custom script in /custom/etc/rc.d:

 

echo "*/1 * * * * /boot/bin/ls-r.sh >/dev/null 2>&1" >> /var/spool/cron/crontab.5000

 

my ls-r.sh contains:

 

ls -R /mnt/user >/dev/null 2>&1

sleep 30

ls -R /mnt/user >/dev/null 2>&1

 

Did I do it right?  How do I tell if cron is really executing this... I have a feling it isn't, my drives are still spinning up.

 

I think that is incorrect.

 

See this thread for more examples.

 

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2583.0

http://lime-technology.com/forum/index.php?topic=2876.msg26369#msg26369

 

Also, I do not know if the */1 as the first parameter will work.

I think you need to use the * alone and use the script defined which has the sleep in it.