Why "queued file opeations" feature is not enabled by default?

[John_C]

I'm trying to understand why "queued file opeations" feature is not enabled by default. (Configuration > File Operations > Queue file opeations).

From what I read, it seems that this feature is quite useful:

Queued File Operations. Background file operations can optionally be processed sequentially (in a queue), which is often far more efficient than processing them in parallel.

With queueing enabled successive operations are lined up in sequence and completed one after the other. E.g. if you initiate a job, say a Copy operation, while another one is still in progress, the new one will be delayed until the other one is finished. This is also known as asynchronous copy.

Without queueing background file operations are processed in parallel. Parallel processing can be quite inefficient and may put unnecessary stress on your hard disks because of excessive head movements.

However, since it is not enabled by default, there are probably some side effects?

[highend]

Because there are storage systems that don't suffer from the speed penalty that head movement on normal HDDs produce? E.g. SSDs, ramdisks, etc.
So why should users with only high speed devices have that option as default?

[John_C]

Because there are storage systems that don't suffer from the speed penalty that head movement on normal HDDs produce? E.g. SSDs, ramdisks, etc.
So why should users with only high speed devices have that option as default?

Hm, but why not? Here we came to the possible side effects of this feature.

[admin]

I think it has historical and technical reasons.

At some point "queued file operations" were added as a new feature, and it was a lot of complicated work to implement it. Such a thing you naturally offer as an option to try it out, not as a default.

I also find it normal to have the basic, natural, easy-to-understand variant as default, and the complex, smart, over-your-head variant as an option.