Dokany up to 36x slower than WebDAV in 1.4.15

Hi folks,

I am currently testing Cryptomator as an alternative to Boxcryptor Classic (free), which I have been using successfully for years, but which is long past its end of life and besides, it only allows one vault.

After I noticed that Cryptomator-Dokany was ~5x slower than Boxcryptor in writing a realistic set of ~5 GB and ~20.000 files (initially, empty vault) I did some tests with CrystalDiskMark6 and the Parkdale speed test mostly comparing Dokany and WebDAV and found that Dokany was lagging WebDAV especially when writing and with a margin of up to 1:36.

My test setup was a Lenovo W540 with 32 GB and a 1TB EVO SSD, Win81 Pro. I checked that (HiDrive) Synchronization was halted in all cases and that the Dokany driver used by Cryptomator was the latest version. Below are the results from CrystalDiskMark6, which are fully in line with the Parkdale results, which I tested against, mostly for sanity checking reasons:

Test type						Dokany	WebDAV	Ratio
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1)	215,755	310,508	69,48%	
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8)	22,650	196,729	11,51%	
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1)	21,661	24,558	88,20%	
Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1)	5,749	23,544	24,42%	
Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1)	1,572	31,784	4,95%	
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8)	2,041	75,433	2,71%	
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1)	1,978	36,542	5,41%	
Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1)	1,489	37,580	3,96%	
----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Test : 500 MiB [K: 82.6% (745.7/902.9 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]		

At those write rates, Dokany vaults are completely useless, but the WebDAV rates are pretty good and equal if not even better than those of Boxcryptor. However, since I would rather use Dokany than WebDAV with Cryptomator, I would be much interested to hear if anyone can confirm this slowness also for the latest Cryptomator version?

Regards,
Ingmar

I cannot confirm this. I will add some benchmark results later.

What is your Cryptomator version and what is your Dokany version?

Since version 1.4.12 you have additional mount parameters with Dokany. There you can increase the timeout parameter and the number of threads to handle file system operations. I suggest to increase these parameters, e.g. --timeout 30000 --thread-count 50. Does this increase the performance?

Thanks for your answer. Cryptomator is version 1.4.15 and Dodanky is 1.3.0.1000

I tried with the user defined options for dokany as suggested by you and the results are - worse! Write performance is now only 1/2 of the already minimal speed I got with the default dokany options and the results for CrystalDiskMark6 and Parkdale again are fully in line. This time I shut down ALL other running programs and apps, including any antivirus and other “offerings”.

For simplicity’s sake here is a copy and paste of the results from CrytalDiskMark6 and from Parkdale for these settings:

Cryptomator 1.4.15
Dokany 1.3.0.1000

Dokany Options
–timeout 30000 --thread-count 50

CrystalDiskMark 6.0.2 x64 © 2007-2018 hiyohiyo
##################################################

  • MB/s = 1,000,000 bytes/s [SATA/600 = 600,000,000 bytes/s]

  • KB = 1000 bytes, KiB = 1024 bytes

    Sequential Read (Q= 32,T= 1) : 193.436 MB/s
    Sequential Write (Q= 32,T= 1) : 2.385 MB/s
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 32.653 MB/s [ 7971.9 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 8,T= 8) : 1.737 MB/s [ 424.1 IOPS]
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 16.980 MB/s [ 4145.5 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 32,T= 1) : 0.934 MB/s [ 228.0 IOPS]
    Random Read 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 6.796 MB/s [ 1659.2 IOPS]
    Random Write 4KiB (Q= 1,T= 1) : 0.850 MB/s [ 207.5 IOPS]

    Test : 500 MiB [K: 83.5% (753.7/902.9 GiB)] (x3) [Interval=5 sec]
    Date : 2019/08/29 8:26:34
    OS : Windows 8.1 Pro [6.3 Build 9600] (x64)

Parkdale 2.99
##################################################
902.9 GB Cryptomator (K:) :
166.4 MByte/sec read - 6.7 MByte/sec, 1711.8 IOPS, 0.58 ms
918.7 kByte/sec write - 603.1 kByte/sec, 150.8 IOPS, 6.63 ms

I can confirm that difference. A 20 MB PDF file, via WebDAV, only needs one or two seconds to be written, the same file written under Dokany needs nearly a minute!

Now I updated Dokany to 1.3.1.1000, but with no effect.

See Verschlüsseln und Entschlüsseln sehr langsam

Seeing even more dramatic results, gave up on Dokany with the latest Cryptomator (1.5.11).

Not sure if it matters that the vault is on a Dropbox. Set to sync local but it isn’t done syncing yet.