iDisk Performance

--On October 11, 2005 7:10:31 AM -0700 David Garrison <dave_listyesmag.ca> =

wrote:

> I recently bought .Mac accounts for the editorial staff at our small
> magazine primarily because using iDisk seemed a really easy way for
> us to share files, especially now that two of our editors have
> laptops and are doing the majority of their editing from home.
> Unfortunately, we've found the performance of the iDisk ranges from
> slow to painfully slow.

Have you turned on "iDisk Syncing" (in Preferences:.Mac:iDisk)? This=20
effectively gives you a local copy to work with (at the price, naturally,=20
of using space on your local disk drive).

Without iDisk syncing, things can't go faster than your effective network=20
speed, which, uh, can vary widely.

Cheers
  -- perry

---------------------------------------------------------------------------
Perry The Cynic perrycynic.org
To a blind optimist, an optimistic realist must seem like an Accursed =
Cynic.
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On Oct 11, 2005, at 10:10 AM, David Garrison wrote:

> I recently bought .Mac accounts for the editorial staff at our small
> magazine primarily because using iDisk seemed a really easy way for
> us to share files, especially now that two of our editors have
> laptops and are doing the majority of their editing from home.
> Unfortunately, we've found the performance of the iDisk ranges from
> slow to painfully slow.

My wife found this to be a crippling problem with her iDisk, but I
was able to eliminate the delay altogether by using Transmit's WebDAV
function to access idisk.mac.com. It's almost as simple as the Finder
was, and far faster and more reliable.

http://www.panic.com/transmit/


JSM

--On October 11, 2005 7:10:31 AM -0700 David Garrison <dave_listyesmag.ca>
wrote:

> Is there anything that can be done about this? If not, are there any
> alternatives to iDisk?

You could go with a semi-roll your own solution. For example one FTP
workflow:
a) Assuming bandwidth at your own site prevents you from using your own FTP
server, get a web hosting account with FTP support.
b) setup ftp accounts for appropriate people
c) use Interarchy's FTP disk or other syncing features to make file
transfer seemless.

I've only recently begun using FTP's disk sync for some web server
setup/management and am pretty happy with how easy it is to move files
around just like they were regular disks. And FTP tends to be one of the
fastest file transfer protocols around. As long as your system doesn't
require high-security or use files with resource forks this should work
pretty well. If you need better security use Interarchy's support for SFTP.

<http://www.interarchy.com/main/>

iDisk uses WebDAV for transfering files and I've come to dislike many of
it's limitations and tend to avoid using it. Every WebDAV solution I've
tried has been significantly slower than just about every other method.

If you can host your own server, you can look at setting up a AFP file
server. These are fast, and because it isn't the vastly more popular
Microsoft developed SMB networking it doesn't get attacked by zombie
scanning machines. Macs and Unix/Linux (via Netatalk) can connect to AFP
file shares. I have AFP shares on my Linux box to hold my iTunes library,
backups and video files.

<http://netatalk.sourceforge.net/>

I too have this problem and would love to work around it. Can you tell me something about Transmit? Their website is comically cryptic.

thanks Kevin

Have you turned on "iDisk Syncing" (in >Preferences:.Mac:iDisk)? This=20 effectively gives you a local copy to work with (at the price, >naturally,=20 of using space on your local disk drive).

Great tip! I will try that. I assume that speeds up moving files to and from the idisk. However I will probably have to still deal with the slow upload speed when I actually re-upload the folder with the new html files for my website to the idisk "sites" folder.

Paul W.

On 19 Oct 2005, at 02:54, paulwilson9 wrote:

> Have you turned on "iDisk Syncing" (in >Preferences:.Mac:iDisk)?
> This=20 effectively gives you a local copy to work with (at the
> price, >naturally,=20 of using space on your local disk drive).

Watch out for "iDisk Syncing". Although it gives you a local copy, it
can introduce a significant delay in the opening of "Open..." dialog
boxes as the OS polls the iDisk server. I found the delay too much
and switched off local syncing. YMMV.

Richard T

I agree that the performance of iDisk is not only painfully but
inappropriately slow.

I solved this problem by using the program "Transmit," an FTP client
program. I can send things by the megabytes with no problem and at an
appropriate DSL/Cable speed as well. Therefore, I no longer use
iDisk. I only use the synchronize for my mail and Safari stuff and
that is it! For some reason, that works at a fairly decent clip.

Anyse