Converter 4.3 - Throttling

Posted on 2 mins read

In my previous post about Converter 4.3 - My First Impressions - I mentioned a new feature called Throttling which was introduced in the new version.

So what does it do? You can limit the amount of resources that will be used by the Conversion Task.

I would like to clarify two things about throttling:

  1. This is only valid for Windows Machines this has no effect for Linux.
  2. The throttling is not done one the ESX host.

You can use throttling in two different scenario’s

  1. Conversion of a Powered on Windows OS In this case the throttling occurs on the source machine being converted - minimizing the resources used by the conversion process.
  2. Conversion of a Powered off Windows OS In this case the throttling occurs on the machine where you are running the converter application - minimizing the resources used by the conversion process as to not interfere with the regular operation of the OS.

Why would you want to do use throttling? Because a conversion task competes for computing resources with other processes. To limit the impact of the conversion task on other workloads, you can throttle the task. If you do not throttle conversion tasks, they are carried out with normal priority and depending on the available computing resources during conversion.

Lets give an example.

Case 1 - Powered on OS - The throttling is performed on BIG_SERVER

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Case 2 - Powered off OS - The Throttling will occur on SMALL_CLIENT

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The CPU throttling drop-down menu, has 3 options

None - The priority of the current conversion task is set to normal.

Light - The priority of the current conversion task is reduced slightly below normal.

Medium - The priority of the current conversion task is set to lowest.

You can also throttle the maximum network bandwidth that will be used during the conversion

You cannot throttle disk I/O from the Converter Standalone interface, but by changing the network bandwidth indirectly will have an effect on the Disk I/O

It will be interesting to see numbers on what the difference is.. From a capture of a conversion, I did not see the process changed to a lower priority

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