Add Reliance NITRO to the list of supported file systems

[Miha_Vitorovic]

It has a number of improvements over the plain Reliance FS. One of them is, that there is no (less) preformance degradation when there are over x*100 files in one folder. One thing to note is that the system suffers even if you are not reading the files from the folder in question.

[ScotSalmon]

Nitro is definitely on our radar.  The performance degradation with large numbers of files is a serious issue with older Reliance.  However, one factor we have to consider is that Nitro is not backwards compatible with our current Reliance option.  That has made us hesitant to make the change.

[Miha_Vitorovic]

I would expect that PXI users are mostly knowledgebale enough to know that different file systems use usually not compatible. But great to hear you're at already considering it.

[QFang]

ScotSalmon, I can relate and understand your (NI's) hesitation, but realize that the longer you wait, the more units you sell, and the bigger this potential support issue will be. In my opinion, the longer you wait, the more expensive it could become when/if you do make the change.

By the way, is there a resource I can look at to understand this limitation better? Is the degradation only if you have 100's of files in one folder? What if you have 100's of folders with only a few files in each? And how much does the system suffer? What about the NI temp folder on cRIO's? It keeps growing and populating with temp files and in some cases seem to grow uncontrollably? This aparently is not only bad from a wear-leveling perspective but also performance? Is there a good NI whitepaper on this? 

[QFang]

Not to beat a dead horse here, but this is probably the singular most important feature in this whole list in my humble opinion, especially since folder content on the overall drive is not exclusively up to our software and certain NI generated folders can trigger the problems with the old Reliance version. As far as backwards compatibility, why not make it an explicit option in MAX that you have to deploy with NITRO if you need and care, and if not, you get the default same old? Would that not solve some of the concerns?

I'm also still curious about any whitepaper or information on handling these issues and the tmp folder on the cRIO's and how that factors in. Oh, and I also noticed that the new Reliance NITRO lists "High Performance on large files(50kB+)" which indicates that the performance is less than great on "large" files above 50kB which is not all thata large for log files.

I wish more people would kudo this idea and bubble it up..