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In EDA environment, the primary use case for SmartPools daily is to execute tiering from performance note to capacity node pool (or tier) or vice versa.
SmartPools job goes to every file, and the scanning portion of jobs can result in significant random impact to the cluster and lengthy execution times when cluster is hosting billions of EDA project data files, mostly text-based and very small file size.
To address this, there are SmartPoolsTree job and FilePolicy job.
SmartPoolsTree job goes to a tree of files instead of every files. If the file pool policies that you have defined are not changing the protection settings for a given path, then the SmartPoolsTree job can be run instead of SmartPools.
The SmartPoolsTree job can also be used to quickly set ingest policy on directories, execute a dry run, apply to directories only, or apply a policy recursively. This job can be scheduled to run at specific times or can be run manually.
For EDA environment, SmartPoolsTree jobs can be created if the SmartPools job is found to be taking too long to complete. Do not delete the file pool policies, rather, the schedule of SmartPools job can be changed so that it runs less frequently.
FilePolicy job provides a faster, lower impact method for applying file pool policies than the full-blown SmartPools job. In conjunction with the IndexUpdate job, FilePolicy improves job scan performance by using a ‘file system index’, or changelist, to find files needing policy changes, rather than a full tree scan. This dramatically decreases the amount of locking and metadata scanning work the job is required to perform, reducing impact on CPU and disk - albeit at the expense of not doing everything that SmartPools does. The FilePolicy job enforces just the SmartPools file pool policies, as opposed to the storage pool settings. For example, FilePolicy does not deal with changes to storage pools or storage pool settings, such as:
However, the vast majority of the time SmartPools and FilePolicy perform the same work. Disabled by default, FilePolicy supports the full range of file pool policy features, reports the same information, and provides the same configuration options as the SmartPools job.
Since FilePolicy is a changelist-based job, it performs best when run frequently - once or multiple times a day, depending on the configured file pool policies, data size and rate of change.