The aim is to pre load read request data from the PVS server prior to users logging into the system and initiating actions which would trigger these read requests.

This may help user experience on: 

• first use of a booted target for some customer environments, where network latency is higher than expected of lan conditions (1+ milliseconds).
• help in other environments where there is an errant volume of read requests and it has been detected that windows memory management on windows targets is not always caching dlls as expected in RAM, resulting in much higher read requests to the PVS server than expected.

Instructions

Two commonly used example applications chrome and edge have 2 large dlls  (~250 MB each) loaded at startup

• "C:\Program Files\Google\Chrome\Application\108.0.5359.95\chrome.dll"
• "C:\Program Files (x86)\Microsoft\Edge\Application\109.0.1518.78\msedge.dll"

In poor latency environment loading these files may take 10s of seconds to be read. In other environments with target side windows memory management not caching not working as expected, continuous reading of these files directly from PVS server vdisk can add GBs of data requested by each target device, which in a large farm with 1000s of targets quickly adds overhead to infrastructure used by PVS environment.


 

Method 1

This depends on windows memory management for caching disk reads in ram.

Configure a local start-up script in private mode

• Script aims to to read the files of interest at start-up.
• The start-up script should then be active when vdisk is switched to standard mode, and configured for cache in device ram with overflow to local hard disk
• Windows memory management should cache these files into memory when read by the startup script, so they will not need to be read from the PVS server vdisk when a user launches the program.

Script steps:

1. Read the files of interest.

Method 2:

This is more reliable and does not depend on windows memory management caching of reads.

Configure a local start-up script in private mode

• Script aims are to write files of interest into PVS target cache
• The start-up script should then be active when vdisk is switched to standard mode, and configured for cache in device ram with overflow to local hard disk
• Ensure PVS target side cache contains the files of interest.
  • PVS cache contains all writes to the streamed C drive.
  • To ensure files of interest are in the PVS cache, they need to be written to the streamed C drive.

Script steps:

1. Backup the files of interest from the streamed C drive
2. Delete the original files from the C drive
3. Copy back in place the copies of the files of interest.
4. Any subsequent reads of these files will come from PVS target cache and not PVS server.