Put my licensed version of DOPUS onto my work laptop, which is an ok spec. It is configured with Always on and the directories that are really slow are the shared network drives over the VPN. The yare much slower than File Explorer to read.
Might there be anything I can do to optimise for this kind of setup. I needed DOPUS in this instance for an easy wat to change attributes of saved outlook messages - amongst all the other reasons for DOPUS of course.
Turn on Generic Icons (Preferences / Folders / Folder Display / Show generic icons for...)
Disable antivirus scanning (which can affect different processes differently)
Remove all file display columns other than Name
Close the folder tree
Avoid thumbnails mode or anything else that displays thumbnails
Remove any shortcuts to network drives (including shortcut files, toolbar buttons, and favorites)
Try the default toolbars (if you've customized yours a lot)
Disable all scripts (Preferences / Toolbars / Scripts)
Turn off Preferences / File Operations / Options / Detect external file changes on network drives (although turning this off will cause other problems, it might point to the type of issue).
If it's still slow after doing all of that, then it's probably not worth trying anything else.
Most times we have investigated a report like this, with network drives on remote corporate VPNs, and where the above haven't helped, the logs have shown that the remote drive is so slow there is not much that can be done. The same logs usually show that File Explorer is also experiencing long delays, but it's just not as immediately apparent. (Even if File Explorer is doing less with the drive than Opus, if basic operations like requesting a file's attributes are taking 5+ seconds to complete per file then it's a lost cause to try and make that fast. SMB just wasn't designed for that kind of network latency.)