Windows Home Server: Demigrator.exe Interrupts Media Streaming

Up until quite recently I had Windows Home Server (WHS) installed as a virtual machine on VMware vSphere. My Media Center PC was connected to WHS and I would stream High Definition (HD) content between the two without any issues.

The strange thing is, now that WHS is installed on physical hardware, my HD streams are regularly interrupted by Demigrator.exe on WHS – which is very annoying. This could be due to the fact that my media is duplicated on WHS now that it is not virtualized?

I attempted to fix this last night by installing ThreadMaster on WHS and saw some improvements. In about an hour and a half I only noticed two interruptions to a HD steam with ThreadMaster running on WHS – and only one of those interruptions was bad. Previously I might get 3 or 4 interruptions per hour.

ThreadMaster does not have a GUI and must be manually installed and configured. I will include my initial settings as follows, but I will most likely play around with them to see if I can improve things further:

First download ThreadMaster to your WHS and extract it.

Click Start, then Run and type cmd and then click OK. Browse to the location of the extracted files using the cd command, for example:

cd c:\Documents and Settings\Administrator\Desktop\tminst112

Then type install.bat into the command prompt and then press Enter. This will install ThreadMaster.

ThreadMaster is configured through the registry, so click Start and then Run again and type regedit and then click OK. Browse to HKEY_Local_Machine\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\Services\ThreadMaster\Parameters. As you can see there are two Parameters that I have set.

• CPUThresholdPct is the CPU load threshold per application. This is a global setting and affects all applications, unless specified in the “Application” or “Exceptions” sections. Default: 15%, Valid range 3 – 100.
• MainSampleTime is the time period used for calculating the average CPU utilization for applications. Default: 30 seconds. Values above 10 seconds accepted.

In the Applications section you can see that I have added Demigrator.exe and given it the value of 5. Here 5 represents the CPUThresholdPct for Demigrator.exe.

I will play with these settings over time, and hopefully be able to view media without interruption, but for now these settings have helped fairly well.

Update:

Since creating this post I have been regularly been adding HD content to my WHS courtesy of a newly acquired HD Homerun (recording .wtv streams from Comcast). All of this content lands in the Recorded TV folder which is set for duplication – sadly I have still been noticing demigrator.exe interrupting my WHS media streams.

My revised solution for now is simply to schedule when demigrator.exe can run, as per the following scripts by GaPony on the We Got Served forums:

DemigratorOff.bat:

@echo off
sc stop "DriveExtenderMigrator"
sc config  "DriveExtenderMigrator" start=  disabled
exit

DemigratorOn.bat:

@echo off
sc config  "DriveExtenderMigrator" start= demand
sc start "DriveExtenderMigrator"
exit

I scheduled these batch files using Task Scheduler on WHS (Start, All Programs, Accessories, System Tools, Task Scheduler).