I've got some directories with a few thousand files in them. Total Commander reads the directory and is up and ready to go in about 3 seconds. DOpus sits there on 'Reading folder' for at least 2 minutes then finally gets there. I have tried turning off all of the columns apart from name, size and modified, but no change. There's a lot of mp4 files so I am wondering whether DOpus is reading each one for information about each file. Is there anything I can do to speed up the loading of these directories, or see where DOpus is spending all that time? Thanks.
A few thousand files shouldn't take that long.
Delays during that stage are usually caused by having shortcuts to unreachable network servers, and the option to sort shortcuts to folders like folders instead of files. (In Opus 13, we display a message when resolving those shortcuts, so it's easier to know it's them causing the problem.)
Agreed, and Total Commander has no problems so I think we can rule out the environment. I really don't know where to look to try and pin down the problem. My feeling is that DOpus is reading the files for information but I don't know how to stop it (if that's even what is happening)
Did you look for shortcuts, and what they point to, in the folder in question?
No shortcuts are present.
What kind of directory is it? Network drive, local, removable, etc.? Is cloud storage involved?
Which types of files are in it?
Which columns are turned on, and which is being sorted by? (Grouping may also be important, if you're using that.)
Local drive, columns are Name, Size and Modified. I see an awful lot of disk read activity which is why I am suspicious that DOpus is reading all the files. There's a lot of big mp4 files in the problem directories. Not sure what grouping is outside of flat view, but I'm not using that anyway.
A Process Monitor log might shed some light.
Yeah, it might. I was just trying to ascertain if I was missing something obvious. It seems only DOpus is making a meal of this apparently simple 'show me the contents of this directory' command. I will continue to poke around.
If you make a log of what happens, we can look at it. Instructions are here:
If it's taking several minutes, process snapshots generated during the delay may also be useful (possibly more useful, depending on what's going on):
Mystery solved. I tried renaming descript.ion and found the problem went away. I then noticed that descript.ion, a text file with around 8k lines in it, was a whopping 318MB in size. Er, what? There was some rubbish in that file that was padding it out to be such a ridiculous size. A few minutes with an editor fixed the problem and now DOpus is loading the problem directory in a couple of seconds. Thank you for your replies, Jon and Leo.
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