Okay, I'm trying, hard. I've captured a few when starting Opus/new lister. Most of them were about ~200MB, except on which got rather large (789MB??, ~3.5x as large as the others). That was the easy part. I failed at capturing anything that takes eg. 1-2s instead of the few miliseconds it used to. I'm not fast enough to init the operation, switch to Task manager and request the dump. I got another dump that had started after beginning to refresh my D: partition and completed after the refresh finished.
I hope that would prove enough to narrow down the list. I peeked at the preferences but that list is HUGE. I simply cannot afford the time to check each and every one of them. It also seems hopeless to rebuild my config from scratch. 6 dump files, summing to 1.78GB, compressed to 805MB. I doubt that would make any email servers happy. May I email a download link to the above email instead?
I've shared the folder containing the dumps and the config backup and sent the link in an email. The largest dump and the config are still uploading, Google estimates the time remaining to be 1hr 20min. My upload bandwidth is, well, rubbish
My guess is that Windows 10 has messed up your graphics drivers, as all of the dumps indicate delays when creating bitmaps or loading icons, and Windows 10 has a habit of doing this with drivers, often during the larger updates (Creators Update, etc.).
I recommend downloading & installing the latest drivers for your GPU, then reboot and see if the performance issue is still there.
@Leo, I tried updating drivers but Windows reported it was already using the "best" possible driver. It is usually a healthy thing to give a certain level of doubt to anything Windows says but everything else seems to be operating normally so I decided to give it some credit there. Then I gave a try what @auden said and now it seems to be working normally again. Speed is (sort of) back to normal. However, I guess that setting (setting value of Auto from 1 to 0 in HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Explorer\VolumeCaches\Thumbnail Cache) was set to 1 with reason. I'm afraid there might be some unwanted side-effects by turning it down to 0.
I have been running with the registry fix for some weeks now without any ill effects that I can detect. The problem is apparently caused by a bug that causes the new version of Windows 10 to delete its thumbnail cache when it reaches quite a small number of megabytes, thus causing the thumbnails to be rebuilt over and over again.
It cripples the computer.
@Leo, yes, keeping drivers up to date, and not believing everything Windows says is a general rule of thumb, and I'm surely going to follow that road.
Nevertheless, here's an update that might interest you as well, @auden. It looks like that feature of Windows required a "reboot" on its own. Typical Windows solution of the old times. If something goes bad, restart something. It might not do it next time.
When I disabled it, Opus returned to its original speed. I downloaded the latest driver for my graphics driver, but haven't installed it yet. I wanted to turn the feature back so that I can be sure that updating the drivers will definitely be the step that's going to fix the issue. However, the problem hasn't come back, not even after a machine restart. I'm going to leave it (the registry) that way and install the driver update after posting this. Hopefully, we'll see no more of this issue.
It might be worth your while having a look at this web page. It gives a clear and concise explanation of the thumbnail cache situation on the latest version of Windows 10.
It also suggests TWO registry fixes are required to put an end to this constant and irritating rebuilding of the thumbnail cache.
I have just installed the second registry fix, although I have to say that the first alone put an end to my problems.
The first thing I tried was to update my video drivers. It made absolutely no difference.
I'm not sure why the thumbnail cache would affect what was shown in the dump, which looked like the Windows GDI component was stalling when it was asked to create bitmaps for drawing parts of the UI (not thumbnails).
I'm not sure either. It's also interesting why that tweaking the registry looked as if it had worked at first. It seems it has been a coincidence only.
On the other hand, I also don't get what kind of problem would the driver update solve that only manifests after restoring my Opus config. While I do have removed some toolbars and added a few other, I haven't done anything extraordinary. It's still drawing the same UI, isn't it?
I've tried the popular InSpectre tool which not only shows the status of Meltdown & Spectre mitigations on your system, but also provides the buttons to disable or re-enable the OS mitigations (I recommend to restart after toggling), so you can try if there's any difference.
In my limited testing (with mitigations disabled & after restart) so far it seems Opus folder-browsing while under heavy disk load is now back to pre-patch performance (snappy and unaffected). I'm not denying it could be a placebo effect, but it does seem better for now.
My guess is that this Windows update will fix the problem for you as well:
I didn't have a problem in Opus, but saw problems in another program, which are fixed after that update installed on my PC. The thread above is about a similar problem in Opus for a couple of people, which the Windows update also solved (for at least one so far).
Not very likely I have had that installed on 02.10 so if that would do any good here it would have already manifested. I'll start the not so fast but much more furious task of checking each config setting manually. Hmm, it seems I'm getting desperate...
EDIT: Now that's interesting.
I've two Fields checked in Display > Fields. Current sort field and Extension (dirs). As soon as I unchecked those two, Opus instantly became snappier. Not as fast as it was, but definitely quicker. What's even funnier, it seems to be gradual. Unchecking only one of them only makes it slightly faster. Restoring the Fields page to its default (regardless of the fact that I had made changes to no other items there ) will make it even faster.
Restoring defaults to Display > Colors and Fonts too gets Opus back to (almost) normal. There's' one item there that makes a rather significant difference: Files and folders - System. Disabling/enabling that has a drastic effect on eg. scrolling, that is, holding down arrow keys and waiting for the repeat to kick in. Traversing through 23 items in a folder having system files present with that setting disabled takes <1.5 seconds. The same having it enabled it takes >3 seconds and feels pretty sluggish.
I can live with the two Fields settings disabled. However, I'd rather not have my system file/folder coloring lost to this issue. Any hints on what could be done to keep both the speed and the coloring?
I dreaded to update Opus to 12.9 but did it to end this misery once and fore all. It was a success, in some sense. After living for months with an Opus that was not the fastest snail in the drawer (and not even the second one), my snail had decided to draw its last breath and die silently. Well, not that silently, I'm sure I was cussing pretty loud and clear.
it seems that I had finally nailed that 365 bytes of the darned lazy bastard. I've spent hours to scribe down each and every detail in both Preferences and Customize and rebuilt my settings inch by inch (or to be more precise, in snail terms, foot by foot). The stuff was lightning fast almost till the end. Right after I imported my last custom toolbar, it dropped dead. As soon as I removed the command Go > Drive List from the toolbar, Opus woke up, noticed that "Hey, I'm late" and went back to "I'm pretty fast, ain't I, huhh?" I've reproduced the effect a dozen times to be sure, and it's definitely that one, which caused my nightmares. Right now, it must be halfway to the Moon (at least it was flung that direction), and I hope to never see it again
I don't have a folder called Computer, but I do have one named This PC, the one where I get going one level up from the root of any lettered drive. That one is fast as well, no flickering or slowdowns.
I don't usually use the folder tree but I tried it this time. It does take a couple of seconds until it gets fully populated when I open the tree in a folder several levels ( >8 ) deep, but that does not seem to be out of order. It also does not get unresponsive during reading the tree as it did before when switching from one lister to another, or between two tabs in the same lister.
Except the drivers are updated and the registry setting is disabled and it's still slow.
Drive List.