Hi fellas,

Would you just look at this thing I made yesterday?



As you've probably guessed from the post title it's a real-time disk IO monitor. Not hard to do by any means, but what makes it interesting is how it visualizes the data.

In short - when it draws a vertical bar to display a byte count, it factors the value into megabytes, kilobytes and bytes and then displays each of these separately, in their own dedicated "band".
In long - see here for an explanation how to read this graph and why it's done that way to begin with.

If you feel like playing with it, there's a dev build - https://bvckup2.com/files/io-monitor.exe.

70 KB, no dependencies, just save somewhere and run.

It is hard-coded to monitor C:\ at 500ms sampling rate for now.

It defaults to monitoring C:\, but another drive can be selected by clicking on "Disk C:".
The sampling rate is still fixed at 500ms.
And, no, you can't resize the window yet either :)

Have a look, let me know what you think.

Thanks,
Alex

Hi fellas,

I'd like to get your esteemed opinions on my little Xmas side project - https://ccsiobench.com

CCSIO stands for Cold-Cache Sequential IO

It's a little benchmark that tries to find the best way read/write large files at a given location, be it a local volume, a virtual mount or a remote share

You basically tell it "C:\Foo" and it tells you "Max read speed is 2144.3 MBps if using 8 x 2MB buffers in direct IO mode."


The way it works is that it goes through a list of (io-buffer-size, io-buffer-count, io-mode) combinations, measures bulk throughput for each and tallies up the results.

Homepage has exact benchmark description and there's a longer, more technical description over at Fundamentals of Fast Bulk IO page.

The back story of this is that I've been building myself a machine and considered various ways to settle in - with a VM, with a portable USB drive, with a TrueCrypt container, etc. - and, being a mature adult that I am, wanted to check what performance penalties I'd be looking at for each option. I found some benchmarking apps (CrystalDiskMark, HDTune Pro, etc), but all of them required manually changing the buffer size/count between the runs and none of them allowed testing with different IO modes. So as per usual I just did a teenage eye-roll and wrote what I wanted. You know the drill.

Hi guys,

I'd like to announce that my long-running backup project is finally feature-complete and available for public testing!

Check it out here - http://bvckup2.com - or read on for the summary and what's new in the v2.

--

Here's a couple of screenshots just to spruce up the thread, but go and see the website, there's plenty more.



Main window (with log panel hidden)



Backup config

--

As you may or may not know, original Bvckup was a simple directory cloning tool that I wrote for my own use back in 2009. What made it unique is its use of delta copying (whereby it would only copy modified parts of every file after the initial copy) and its real-time (continuous) backup mode. I put it out on the Internets just for fun and almost forgot about it as it was after all just a pet project. Then a year after I looked at some stats and there's nearly 1000 people of the mailing list and I was all o_O, hmm, interesting.

So I posted it on DC (here), Jesse reblogged it, Stephen reviewed it and I got a lot of useful feedback to mull over.

Long story short, last October I finally bit the bullet, sat down and started working on the Version 2 nearly full-time. It was a complete rewrite and it took about 8 months to get to the first shippable beta. That was in May 2013. Then it stayed in private testing with about 100 people for 5 months and eventually got ready for the open beta. Ta-da!

Short diff against the v1 is as follows:

•    A complete rewrite
•    Native 64 bit support
•    Faster and more robust delta copying
•    Excellent user interface - not to pat myself on a back, but it is really good
•    Major performance improvements across the board
•    Removable device tracking
•    Move / rename detection
•    Run-as-a-service support

•    Full year of full-time development
•    5 months in private testing with 100 people
•    Stable, robust and of a production quality

•    About 140,000 lines of C and C++ code
•    No dependencies on any 3rd party frameworks or libraries, only native Windows APIs
•    Executable file weighing in a shy under 600KB
•    Idle RAM usage - under 5 Megs

Having previously wrote firmware for firewalls and routers, I have a sticky preference for efficient and highly optimized code. I also happen to get a strong kick out of messing with pixels and so this puts me in an interesting position when I can comfortably wear several hats at once. Bvckup 2 is essentially of show case of that :)

Have a look, give it a try and let me know what you think.

Cheers,
Alex