Azure File Share Slowness

Question

Hi Everyone,

We have deployed Azure file share and have 1 Storage account with around 17 Shares and about 19TB of Data, we are experiencing a lot of slowness in the Shares we have then on Transaction Optimized as well as Hot Storage, one thing that is reported to me is if a user has a Zip They extract it on the desktop and copy to the share it takes around 70Sec but if they do it on the share it takes 5 times the time, this is just an example there is a lot more but this is the easiest one to put times around,

Any recommendations.

Answer 1

Hi @Trent Mallon,

I understand that you are experiencing slow performance with Azure File Shares when transferring large files.

Azure file shares have different performance characteristics compared to local desktop.

Azure file shares have specific performance limits depending on the tier and other settings like provisioned capacity and IO/s. These limitations can affect the speed of data transfer, especially when compared to a local server with higher I/O capabilities.

Azure file share involves sending data over the internet which can have latency and bandwidth. Compared to that, copying data to the local desktop is faster due to lower network latency and higher bandwidth. Unzipping tools need to perform multiple metadata operations like checking file attributes, updating the file system, while extracting the files.

To get the better performance, I recommend you to:

Copy the zip file from the Azure File Share to the computer and unzip the file on the computer. Once the file is unzipped, use the tool AzCopy to copy the files back to the Azure file share.

For more details refer:

https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/troubleshoot/azure/azure-storage/files/performance/files-troubleshoot-performance?tabs=windows#slow-performance-when-unzipping-files

Please let us know if you have any further queries. I’m happy to assist you further.

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