Copy or Move in Background: I suggest another button "queue to background"

[Gerdd]

Often I select a bunch of files and hit "copy" or "move" - then I send it off to the background and start on the next lot. If I then send that off to the background as well it starts running in parallel. Off to another lot, but ...

(depending on where the files are coming from or going to (same disk, local disk, USB disk, network disk, etc.) the procedure slows down incredibly. Apparently Windows can't manage the available bandwidth very well and two transfers in parallel run at less than 10% of the speed of each transfer separately.)

What I would love to see in these situations is another button next to the "background" button, something like "queue to background" - hold this lot until the running one and any other previously queued ones are finished.

[wetware05]

Hi.

In Spanish there is a saying that says "dress me slowly, I'm in a hurry". You can overwhelm the data transfer system between drives in two ways. 1. that several processes are reading or writing on the same unit (problem with said unit and its speed and amount of cache). And 2. the data bus can be saturated; this is: the bandwidth of the motherboard bus, which heavily saturates the south bridge and where it ends up communicating with the north bridge, which is a real problem, because such a bridge is tied to graphic transfer (linked to the freshness with which it seems to us that the computer is fast; this problem partly disappears with modern microprocessors, which have included the north bridge along with in the microprocessor).

What I mean is that it is not a good idea to have more than two background file copy processes in total commander. In this case, programs such as fastcopy are recommended, which leave the processes in a queue.

(You should also configure Total commander, to let it know which partitions are on the same drive.)

[Gerdd]

Yes, thanks. "partitions on the same physical drive" - yes, of course. But in many of my situations the drives are not even on the same computer, in others they are on separate USB drives but possibly on the same USB controller.

But I really LOVE the Spanish way with words. I wonder if that could in any way apply to the newly crowned soccer world champion ladies? Maybe they got dressed more slowly than their English opponents?

(of course, I will always prefer staying in the tool I use all day rather than switching to something else, like fastcopy) In fact, I guess I am asking for TC to do the same kind of queuing

[petermad]

2Gerdd
Have you tried using the Background Transfer Manager instead of just sending the current copying to the background.

Use cm_OpenTransferManager command, or press F2 in the Copy dialog to start the Background Transfer Manager.

[Gerdd]

No. I guess it is something that never offered itself to the way I work ("my workflow", as people would say, nowadays.) I'll have to look at it again, but if I have to go and do this in a premeditated fashion it probably wouldn't be intuitive to me. On the other hand, if the mechanism already exists it might be fairly easy to feed the button I am envisaging into it (?)

[Hacker]

Gerdd,
In case you decide it would be best if all copy / move processes started in the background transfer manager, you can add the line
AlwaysCopyInBackground=2
under
[Configuiration]
in your wincmd.ini.

HTH
Roman

[Gerdd]

@Hacker
Roman,
thanks, that may indeed help in certain cases.

For the most part I let copies run in the foreground, but then I may decide that it is taking too long and I want to do some more, so I send the running one to the background and go on selecting the files for the next batch. Then only, when I am ready to start that lot, I realize that I should not run that in another background thread (competing fiercely for resources) but rather start it only when the first one is finished. In the meantime I am thinking about a third lot already ...

That's where a button like the one I am thinking about would come in handy.

I also find myself thinking of a small file that I want out of the way swiftly, so I run that in the foreground - sloooooowly due to resource conflicts, unless I now pause the background task(s) for a moment.

I am currently in a phase where I try to work on the ergonomics of what I am doing a lot of in order to get even more done in less time ...

[Hacker]

Gerdd,
Some time ago I decided it's not worth my time to keep separating file operations based on disks, expected speeds and possible conflicts, and set everything to run in the BTM using the .ini setting above. If I specifically want some operations to run in parallel, I press F2 in the e.g. Copy dialog, to force the operation to run in the foreground. Just my 28 cents (inflation adjusted).

Roman

[Dalai]

Just my 28 cents (inflation adjusted).

You're ahead of your time. That's some heavy inflation right there...

[Gerdd]

@Hacker
Roman,

I think I'll try that for size - I'll come back here to report how it's working for me.

@Dalai
You know, here in South Africa we also have cents, currently it takes 20-21 of them to buy one Euro cent - so to me it doesn't feel exaggerated when Hacker thinks of 28 cents - after all that is at least 5,60 South African Rand (NOT Krugerrand - those are made of gold and cost a LOT more But if you are interested in studying inflation go check out the "Zim Dollar", former currency of our neighbouring country Zimbabwe ... or the Deutsche Reichsmark between World War I and II ... (I realize I am now crossing the border to "off topic" and should move to the chat forum