I've got a few directories where I keep backups of important/useful utilities (archivers, editors, yada). When I load them in DOpus (details mode) it takes an extremely long amount of time to load the lister, in some cases upwards of a minute or two. This is on a 1.1ghz Duron system (lots of RAM) and I don't see why it should be this slow on a system that is supposed to be multi-threaded.
Would it be possible for a future release to do a two-pass load for listers:
Step 1: load a bare lister without any fancy stuff.
Step 2: load the fancy stuff - thumbnails, custom columns, etc.
Opus should already do the fancy stuff in the background after doing the essentials and presenting the basic directory list. There must be something causing the directory read to take a lot of time.
Is there anything unusual about the dir? Network drive? Files of a certain type?
You could try FileMon, a free tool from SysInternals, to see which files Opus is accessing as the directory is read. That often gives some clues.
Presumably Opus is already running when you go to the directory, and it doesn't happen for all directories on your system, nor for this directory when you use Explorer?
Sometimes plugins, particularly the Movie plugin if you have a badly-written video codec installed, can cause problems like this, even though Opus tries to run them in the background. It's worth checking that the problem still exists if you disable all plugins via Preferences / Plugins.
I disabled movie viewers but i still have the problem of Opus bring my PC to an absolute standstill. I have a 3 GHz P4 and 784meg of RAM. Still, every time i access a folder with video in it, i might as well unplug the computer, the memory and CPU usage goes nuts. I saw the memory usage t 370meg and climbing before I shut it down.
I am trying Opus 8.2. I would like to get this resolved before my trial expires.
Questions:
How do i tell a "good codec" from a bad one?
Is the symptom of this problem is the Video Codec, duration and Audio Codec data not displaying in their columns a indicator of something wrong?
Note: i must reinstall Opus then this problem goes away... for a while.
If so then Opus is trying to generate thumbnails for the video files. That can cause a slowdown by itself (although it shouldn't happen if the movie plugin is disabled).
If reinstalling Opus makes things fast again briefly then that sounds a lot like the problem I saw where my anti-virus program was causing Opus's thumbnail caching mechanism to slow down exponentially as the number of cached thumbnails increased. Have a look at this FAQ to see if it helps:
Thanks for the tip, but i am not using thumbnails. I find it strange that i can no longer see the video or audio codec info or the duration of the movie. I think the problem is related. I might try to exclude my movie directory from realtime scanning tho, just for giggles.
I hate loading/unloading codecs, but what codecs do you recommend that will not cause Opus to crawl?
I think I'm only using the FFDShow codec lately. It seems to decode just about every format (that isn't decoded by a default install) at least well enough for me. Since it's updated a lot there can be bad versions of it, though, but I've not had any problem with it for a long time.