What determines speed of a program ran over mapped drive?

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Lets say I have a program installed on both a USB Flash Drive and also a Computer.

Both USB Flash Drive and Computer have the program's based folder shared with full permissions to everyone.

If created a Mapped Network Drive to either one of these 2 folders, I assume that the program I run from the Computer would be running a lot faster than the USB Flash Drive correct?

Is this only because of the harddrive speed that it can read/write that determines the speed of the program and how fast it can run over the network?

What about number of computers running the same file? Is the file technically being ran on the individual computer itself or does it matter what computer its being ran from to make sure it don't bog down a lot when being ran from multiple computers over the network?

Does it just come down to the Router/Modem itself and how fast it pushes the data?

Long story short, I'm just wanting to know if there is a major difference between running a program from a Mapped Network Drive that is located on either a USB Flash Drive or a Computer

EDIT - Since I got a down vote for apparently not fully explaining the type of situation more specifically I'll add more details on why I'm asking.

I have a program that is around 10MB big that is constantly reading/writing to a local SQL file that is stored in the Mapped Network Drive folder (the USB Drive or the Harddrive on the computer)

I have considered moving the folder to an external hard drive (or maybe even a small USB flash drive) instead of having the software installed on a computer just in case I need to move the USB/external to a new location in the future.

My biggest concern is in different "environments" this program can be ran over the network and be access from anywhere between 1 - 15 computers at the same time depending on where I am. I want to know if I could expect a major speed different in the users running the program over the network off a USB/External as opposed to it being on a computer's hard drive instead.

eqiz

Posted 2016-02-02T18:54:13.327

Reputation: 99

2there isn't one? the programs image is loaded into ram at execution time, so it runs from local ram. the location of the exe may affect how long it takes to get the executable into ram and started running, but other than that there is little difference. The big place where there will be a disconnect, is IO. if the program loads files on demand, and they exist on the network, instead of the local system, IO operations against those files will be slower. – Frank Thomas – 2016-02-02T19:47:49.577

I believe whatever the program is accessed from is where the program will pull its resources. On our mapped drives we are able to access the program and run them on most computers that have permission to do so it depends on the program too if you had an example of the program it could help the question out – NetworkKingPin – 2016-02-02T19:48:00.137

@Frank Thomas what about it actually reading/writing constantly though? Wouldn't that affect the speed or is it still loaded into the local ram of the computer doing all the work? – eqiz – 2016-02-04T03:27:32.510

if the data resource is remote, it will be slower than if it is local. it all comes down to bus speed. Sata6G runs at about 6Gbps, USB3 at about 4.5Gbps, and gigabit networking at 1GBps. The network also adds data overhead and a dependency on the CPU. Most of these buses never actually reach their theoretical max, but they pretty clearly describe the comparitive speed of the different buses. Obviously you want to have your data on the fastest bus available, and anything else will be sub-optimal. the slower the bus, the less optimal the solution becomes. – Frank Thomas – 2016-02-04T04:10:58.480

Answers

1

(USB Flash drive or a Computer are not comparable units - you most likely mean USB Flash drive or Hard Drive/SSD)

As you posited, if there is a difference in performance between the 2 usage cases comes down to the speed at which the remote computer can read the information off the disk - USB is usually a lot slower then a hard drive.

The "program data" is pulled across the network and run on the local computer, it is not run on the system the USB is plugged into.

There are a few possible confounding factors to be aware of -

  1. Caching - If you have recently read the contents of the disk, or executed the program, it is possible/probable that this was stored in memory, thus, if you execute the same program more then once may find it a lot faster - as it could be being cached.

  2. Network bottlenecks - Particularly on a WIFI network, you may find that the speed bottleneck is not the drive, its the network. In general, if the LAB is the bottleneck, the speed of the disk/usb will have negligible performance impact. On a WAN (ie if you are executing stuff in another country/city), latency of the connection may also make a difference to the loading speed, particularly if there are a lot of files involved.

davidgo

Posted 2016-02-02T18:54:13.327

Reputation: 49 152

Asked: 2016-02-02T18:54:13.327

Viewed: 74 times

Active: 2016-02-04T03:26:14.700