I'm accessing file shares via VPN.
There are pretty far away from me geographically, so the ping is around 200ms for those servers.
In TC, once the initial connection protocol is over, switching from one folder to the other is pretty fast - I'd say 1/2 second.
In DOpus, it's much slower, I see the "reading folder" messsage & animated icon for around 3 seconds depending on the number of files in there.
Is Dopus trying to read more than just the names? Could it be faster?
Opus probably is reading more than TC. Try this:
[ul][li]Remove columns such as Description, Width, Height and so on which would cause Opus to look inside the files.[/li]
[li]Turn on Preferences / Folders / Options: Display generic icons for network drives.[/li]
[li]Make sure Enable Folder Content Type detection, which I think is in the same place in Preferneces, isn't turned on for network drives, else it may trigger unwanted columns to re-appear.[/li][/ul]Changing your parent button to run Go BACK UP instead of Go UP may also speed up parenting a bit, although I'm not sure if it'll make any difference. (I'm thinking it may cause a cached directory to be used instead of forcing a re-read, but that may happen anyway so this may not make any difference.) There's an option in Prefs to change the little file display border parent buttons to use the same command, too.
I only have the default columns showing (name, size, modified & attributes) and all the preferences you're talking about are already set to that (probably by default).
And like you said, I have GO BACK UP instead of GO UP and yet it's still reloading the content.
So is the difference just that TC is using a cached directory while Opus is always re-reading it? Are the two programs the same speed the first time you enter a directory?
Not at all. TC doesn't cache anything either (at last I can't tell, the browse time is consistent, no matter if I already went into the folder or not).
It's just faster. Maybe it's not accessing the same system functions to read the content of the remote folders.
Also (and not really related) even though while reading we have the option to cancel the read (meaning it's happening on another thread - good thing, not happening in TC), when it's first negotiating authentication it's not possible. So the UI is stuck during that authentication (takes around 10 seconds.. windows is so slow).
Maybe it's the threading issue that makes it slower?