Why does a lot of small files take longer to transfer than few large files?
Applies to
File Based Transfer
ONTAP 9
Answer
- When transferring files, typical applications will copy over a single file at a time
- Each of the file creations requires several metadata operations to occur before the file has been written completely
- Each of these operations could use an additional round trip time (RTT) to complete
- With smaller files, the write portion can complete without ever reaching the bandwidth capacity of the link
- In the graph below you can see that the bytes in flight stayed near capacity with a large file, and the transfer rate is very sporadic with small file transfer.