Slow Folder Details Display for some folders

I keep the install files of the software I use in a folder called Installed Software with subfolders - 'Audio Visual', Development'... 'Utilities' etc.

When I access these folders in Explorer it displays the list of files (.exe, msi and zip files) in 1-2 seconds, although takes quite a few more seconds to paint the icons, but that seems to happen in the background, because there is no hour glass and the folder seems to be usable.

But in Opus I have to wait a long time - 15-20 seconds for a folder of forty files - looking at an empty folder with a hourglass before the list is displayed. When it is displayed all the icons are there, and the list is displayed fast. I tried turning off Preferences->File Display Modes->Details->Display icons, this seemed to make these folders a bit faster, i.e. 10-15 seconds, but still not as fast as Explorer's 1-2 seconds for its initial display. But that setting is global, and even if it solved the problem I wouldn't forgo having the icons present in all my other folders - where I actually find them very useful.

This is peculiar to these folders, everywhere else the Opus file list displays are fast But elsewhere the icons displayed are those associated with a file type or they're .ico files referenced by a folder's desktop.ini. So I am guessing this annoyance is because the icons must be extracted from the exe and msi files. Once I've accessed a subfolder, subsequent accesses happen at the normal Opus fast speed - I guess the icons get cached.

Thanks BetterRed

I just realised - there's no question

How can I make these folders display faster ?

Try the Preferences / Folders / Folder Display / Show generic icons for option to confirm it really is the icons causing it.

(I'd be surprised because, apart from a few filetypes, Opus also gets icons on a background thread, but it's worth checking to be sure).

Thanks jon, I unchecked Preferences/Folders/Folder Display/Show generic icons - still slow

I checked Preferences / Folders / Folder Display / Show generic icons and applied to All Folders The generic icons were displayed and maybe it was a tad faster - but 10-15 seconds rather than 15-20

I have a backup of these files on a removable USB drive - Drive G: - but I still see the embedded icons despite the setting Preferences/Folders/Folder Display/Show generic icons you see here


I only see the generic icons if I set Preferences/Folders/Folder Display/Show generic icons for All Folders - but the speed is still too slow


The reason I think it's to do with the embedded icons is because Windows is normally slow to 'dribble' them down the display - but I don't have to wait for it too finish. However, once Opus has extracted the icons - Explorer is also fast - presumably because both use the same cache - %userprofile%\AppData\Local\IconCache.db.

I might try using Explorer first to populate the iconcache.db

- I wonder if there's setting in Windows to control the clearing of iconcache.db ?

BR

Look at the colums you have displayed. The ones listing number of files contained in folders are also applied to archives as you can see in the screenshots,

That will cause Opus to open the archives (as possibly the .exe files as well, in case they are self-extracting zips, although I am not sure), and that in turn may trigger your antivirus to block Opus while it scans them, which can be very slow with large setup archives/exes.

You probably do not want to have those columns on all the time, as part of your default config, as they can create performance issues. Instead, use a button which can toggle them on only when you actually need them.

As for icon caching, Opus gets the icons from the shell so the same caching mechanism should apply. For clearing the system icon cache, see the Tools section of the forum.

Thanks leo thats given me a solution - but like the folder size problem I had I don't fully understand why

I have folders on the same drive that each contain 28-31+ zips, each zip contains up to 200 items. Opus displays those folders almost instantaneously - faster than Explorer, including file/folder counts for the zips.

On the same drive I have folders with 26-31 subfolders which in some cases contain over a 1,000 sub-subfolders. it takes a few seconds to display the subfolder counts - but there are no hour glass waits. I can watch the counts dribble down the display like I can with the icons in Explorer, which is fine by me.

What I don't like is blank space where I am expecting to see the list of folders & files. And an hour glass displayed wherever the mouse pointer happens to be parked - mine spends 90% of its time on the bottom edge of my monitor - because I use the keyboard most of the time. Even worse I have had the "misty overlay" with an "Opus is not responding" in the title bar... thats only happened a couple of times.

I have 3 drives in a dock, they spin down if they are not used for 15 minutes. If I open a folder on a drive that's spun down then Opus will display a nice Reading Folder progress indicator in the middle of the file list for the few seconds it takes to spin up the drive - beeeewdiful!

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I did the following

[ol][li] built a fresh iconcache.db using this process winhelponline.com/blog/how-t ... ows-vista/[/li]
[li] opened the Utilities sub folder (38 files) in Explorer - file list displayed immediately, took about 6 seconds to populate the icon column - my perception is that it was about twice as fast as it was - has to be the new iconcache.db - but only one test, so...[/li]
[li] changed the columns for the Software Installation folder and its subfolders to name, extension, size, created & modified dates[/li]
[li] opened the Utilities sub-folder in Opus it displayed the filelist immediately and the icons took about 4 secs[/li]
[li] opened the Audio/Visual sub-folder (22 files) in Opus, the filelist displayed in 2 seconds and the icons took ~12 secs[/li][/ol]
The important thing is that I was getting the list, the mouse pointer was not an hour glass - so I wasn't waiting.

It seems to be a combination of zips, file/folder count fields and the embedded icons. I might do some more tests tomorrow, right now everything is cached so it works fast no matter what columns I use. I don't need the file/folder counts in these folders so getting rid of them is an acceptable solution.

I suspect this issue is related to how Opus iterates through folder contents adding up file sizes... which is something I would really like to have the option of disabling globally and explicitly.

BR

The difference is probably caused by your antivirus scanner.

The number of zips or items in the zips won't matter much. The size of each zip, and whether it contains executables/installers or other things, and whether your antivirus scanner caches results or re-scans on every access (and if it does cache them, whether or not it has cached results for the archives in question) are things that will matter.

The antivirus scanner I use can block things for a minute or more when they try to access a several-hundred-meg installer .exe or archive containing installer .exes. Virus scanners typically do deep inspections of such things.

That's what I said. Turn off the columns that cause folder/archive contents to be enumerated.

It has nothing to do with the AV, and in my 30+ years in IT - including running a 24*7 help desk of 40 people for a major international investment bank out of Hong Kong - they rarely are the problem.

Immediately after a boot and before starting Opus I used Explorer to copy the 36 zips and 1 rar from my Software Installations folders to a scratch folder, which has the file and folder count columns. I then started Opus and opened the scratch folder what you see below displayed at normal Opus speed - instantaneously. Which is entirely consistent with all my other folders that contain multiple zips - one has over 200 - they are no problem, Opus works like a dream.

If Opus was unpacking 37 archives to do the counts and my AV was scanning them then I would have heard the disk rattling, and it would not have happened instantaneously - you don't have to unpack a zip or rar to see what files are in it, nor even to see what size they will expand to. This can seen if you open a large archive with WinRAR - it will immediately display the contents, and a file count and the total size the archive would unpack to - even on a multipart rar.

I just turned on my AV logging.

I then opened a 235MB 38 file zip with Opus - the file list displayed instantly. I opened file 182n.png in the archive which Opus wrote to C:\Users\BetterRed\AppData\Local\Temp\dtemp-b4df5a86854699-20.dop\182n.png which the associated program, Fast Picture Viewer opened.

The only file my AV scanned was C:\Users\BetterRed\AppData\Local\Temp\dtemp-b4df5a86854699-20.dop\182n.png

Which is exactly what I expected to see. As far as I can tell Opus only unpacks something an archive when It has to :thumbsup:

I have removed the file & folder count columns from the Software Installation folders - those folders now operate in a similar fashion to Explorer. When first opened the file list is displayed but the icons appear slowly as they are extracted. Subsequently the list and the icons are displayed instantly, which was also the case when I had the file & folder count columns.

I can live without the counts in those folders or I can learn to wait for the contention between icon extraction and zip property querying to resolve itself.

Apart from the Packed column, what are the other Zip-specific columns :question:

BR