CPU/RAM affect on folder compare performance

[bmrnksi]

I'm running BC4 on a VM and I use it to perform a folder comparison on two remote UNC paths. I'm curious, does the amount of vRAM and vCPU on the VM running BC4 at all affect how fast the comparison to complete?

[Chris]

The amount of vRAM in a virtual machine should only affect comparison performance if you're comparing very large folders (1 million or more files in each folder). Beyond Compare uses a certain amount of memory per file, so memory use increases with the number of files compared. Make sure your VM has enough memory for the OS and Beyond Compare to run without swapping to disk, which you should be able to see using Windows Task Manager.

Beyond Compare is multi-threaded, but doesn't have excessive CPU requirements, so adding more vCPUs to a VM shouldn't significantly increase performance.

Performance when comparing folders is mostly I/O bound as long as you have enough system memory to prevent disk swapping for large comparisons. If you're comparing network drives, having a fast network connection and fast disks on the network storage you're accessing probably has the greatest performance impact.

Antivirus scanning can also impact performance; whitelisting bcompare.exe so it bypasses scanning will sometimes improve performance.

[bmrnksi]

Thanks for this. Regarding the antivirus scanning. Should I whilelist the bcompare.exe process, or just the file bcompare.exe?

[Chris]

You'll want to whitelist the process.

[bmrnksi]

Thanks for the confirmation Chris.