Tips

How to Specify a Transfer Interval to Lighten the Load on the Network

Introduction

When performing file transfers, many of you probably want to transfer the files as quickly as possible.
This might not be a problem if your network bandwidth is good, but if your bandwidth isn't so good, increasing the speed of one transfer might suppress other transfers.
Many of our customers need to control bandwidth in order to maintain their quality of service (QoS).

In HULFT, you can specify a Transfer Interval for each block of transfer data in the Send Management Information.
The data is separated internally, and sent in pieces at the specified interval. This is called an intermittent transfer.
By using this feature, you can control bandwidth without monopolizing the network.

In this tip, we will show you how to specify a transfer interval and perform an intermittent transfer in HULFT.

How to Specify a Transfer Interval

The following three settings, located in Extension Settings in the Send Management Information, can be used to specify a Transfer Interval in HULFT.
Transfer Interval (milliseconds), Transfer Block Length (bytes), Transfer Block Count

In HULFT8 and later versions, the initial value for these three settings is 0.
When the values are set to 0, the Transfer Interval, Transfer Block Length, and Transfer Block Count are automatically optimized.
If you execute file transfers with these values set to 0, you can achieve the same transfer speed as you could by customizing HULFT7, without having to perform any tuning.

In addition, by changing these values, you can transfer data at a Transfer Interval of your own choosing.

The following explanation describes each field.

Note: The mathematical product of the value for Transfer Block Length and the value for Transfer Block Count (transfer-block-length × transfer-block-count) must be less than or equal to 65520.

Example: If you specify 4096 for Transfer Block Length, 3 for Transfer Block Count, and 1000 for Transfer Interval, 12288 bytes of data will be transferred at a time, at intervals of 1000 milliseconds.

Performing an Intermittent Transfer

Now, let's try transferring a 100 MB file by using the following transfer interval settings.

Open the Send Management Information screen, and click the Extension Settings tab.

On the Extension Settings tab, specify the given values for Transfer Interval, Transfer Block Length, and Transfer Block Count, and then save the settings.

This completes the transfer interval settings.
With just a few simple settings, we were able to set up a Transfer Interval.

Now, let's execute the file transfer.
For this example, we are testing to make sure that the transfer is performed according to the settings we specified. For this reason, we will perform a loopback transfer, which isn't affected by network conditions.
With the above settings, we can calculate an expected transfer speed of a little less than 130 seconds.

The data was transferred according to the Transfer Interval settings that we specified.

Comparing the Intermittent Transfer to a Normal Transfer

Specify the Transfer Interval, Transfer Block Length, and Transfer Block Count according to the following conditions, and perform the transfer again.

Now, let's take a look at the results.

Comparison Graph

You can see that, by performing an intermittent transfer in order to lighten the load on the network, the transfer speed decreased, but our network usage also decreased.
On the other hand, when we didn't perform an intermittent transfer, the transfer speed was high, but the load on the network was also higher.

Conclusion

So, what do you think?
By using HULFT in this way, you can not only perform fast file transfers, but also specify transfer intervals according to your needs.
With this feature, you can control the load placed on the network, and perform communications that are suited to the quality of your connection.
Each user can select the transfer methods that are most appropriate to the user's own situation.

Please use the transfer method that works the best for your own environment and operations.