Thumbnails and Google File Stream freezes Windows

Help & Support
1

Hi,
I store all of my images on Google Drive (FileStream), and when I access a folder and try to view the images as thumbnails the machine freezes for minutes. This happens on two different machines, and eventually either some thumbnails appear (but scrolling to new ones repeats the issue), they never appear, or DO crashes.
I can open the folder in Explorer and they appear, although some are (as expected) slow to refresh as they are presumably not cached and have to be generated remotely.

The main concern is that when using DO the system blocks all other disk access, as though DO is opening thousands of files, Google Drive opens the same number of remote connections, and even the internet access freezes.
The same issue was discusses here: Problems with Google File Stream
That user reports it was Google Drive "starting up", but using DOS or Explorer doesn't cause the same drastic issues. I'm sure it's Google's virtual drive related, but the same thing happens with Android phones when trying to explore image folders. I have to use Explorer, otherwise it's unusable.

Any suggestions or options I might change to try and address this? Anything I can provide to help find why the issue occurs?

2

You could try reducing the number of thumbnail threads (Preferences / File Display Modes / Thumbnails), so less is being asked of Google File Stream in parallel, but really if some types/amounts of filesystem requests into GFS are causing the entire machine to lock up then you need to report that to Google and get them to fix it, as something else will still trigger it even if you can stop Opus from doing so, and nothing should bring down the entire system like that.

3

Brilliant, thanks. It turns out that the default cache size is 100MB for thumbnails and that was full, I increased it to 11,000MB and it appears to work super-fast.
Very odd, but thanks for the heads-up on where to look.

4

The thumbnail cache size shouldn't cause that kind of problem though. It would just mean, at worst, that thumbnails had to be regenerated more often.

It sounds like Google File Stream may have a problem if several files (or the same file, perhaps) are read in parallel.

5

I've identified the problem.
If I exclude the Google drive (and its local cache location) from Eset antivirus, the problem is gone.
It's interesting that the problem doesn't happen with Explorer, only with DO, but the problem has been worked around.
Thanks for the help.