OSD ACP Turbo feature

This section describes how and what the OSD Toolkit turbo feature does

The OSD Turbo feature is a way to speed up deployments (typically OSD) related content transfers. Normally these are done via BITS, which can run at a slower rate than what is optimal. It's a numbers game right, sometimes people just want to go faster. A detailed explanation on this is available here: https://2pintsoftware.com/news/details/the-updated-osd-toolkit-turbo-feature

The TL;DR version is that we call the native BranchCache API's with bigger buffers to get better speed.

Going fast comes at a price

The CPU of both pulling and service source machines matter. The faster the CPU's, the faster the download is. But since the data has to be decrypted, it will peg your CPU of the machine downloading more than the machine serving the content.

Rules for going fast

  1. Use maximum 5 files in your package source (The Turbo only transfers 5 files). But the Turbo still runs for the largest 5 files for any package.

  2. Keep the size over 50MB per file, Turbo will not run for files smaller than 50MB.

  3. Don't include small .txt files in the source, this will lead to the Turbo downloading the big files and then using BITS to transfer the small files after, which is not so fast.

Enable/Disable

Simple, set a variable named “2PintTurboLicense” to the license key that you got from us. The if you want to disable it, set the license key variable to a blank value (which removes the value).

Reporting status

The Turbo feature writes a log file and also updates the registry keys with information about duration etc. The following registry keys and values are written when the Turbo components runs, they can be used for reference to troubleshoot BranchCache issues.

All TS keys are created under the HKLM\Software\2pint Software\BITSTS\<DeploymentID>\<ContentID> registry path. Each folder is has the following key registry values and return codes. Where <FileId> is mentioned, this is the local file name for the file inside the content.

Registry value
Description

TurboDuration

Total number of seconds the Turbo took to complete for all files (3.0.5.0 and prior this is for the last file)

BytesTotal_<FileId>

How many bytes transferred via turbo for this file

TurboSpeed

The speed of the last turbo file

TurboProgress

Progress in bytes of the last file

TurboReturnCode_<FileId>

The return code per file id

BytesTotalTurbo

Total bytes transferred successfully via Turbo

Value: TurboReturnCode_<filename>

The following known return codes are available:

Return code
Description

0

No errors, all content downloaded via Peer-to-peer

1

General error, most likely certificate based error

4052

The requested data cannot be found in local or peer caches. Typically the content is not on any peers, or only partially there.

4053

The server did not calculate or have the hash available at this point

4062

The requested version is not supported. Most likely you are running on Windows 7.

4064

Not licensed, there is no license for either BranchCache or the 2Pint Software OSD Toolkit Turbo feature.

Any other errors than above typically indicates an issue with the error code as an indication of what went wrong.

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