File sharing performance is very bad

[Guest]

I have a new computer (let's call it SERVER) with WinXP Pro SP2 (Pentium D
3.2, 1GB of RAM, 100Mbit/s ethernet) which shares a folder in my network.
This folder contains approximately 5 000 - 10 000 files. Half of them are
images (JPEG) and the other ones are short description files in binary
format. These files occupy 2-3GB of storage space.

The problem is when I open this shared folder from the SERVER on my computer
it takes about 2-3 minutes to wait for displaying folder contents. My
computer is also WinXP Pro SP2 (a little slower than the server).

While shared folder contents are being read from the SERVER I observed:
- CPU usage on the SERVER is about 1-2%,
- Disk & memory usage is also at the very low level,
- CPU on my computer is about 2-4% used,
- Network utilization is at the level of 0,1-0,5% (!!!!!!!!)

When I installed the SERVER with the same share on Win2000 SP4, the problem
was exactly the same - low network load while reading the folder.

When I connected old Windows Millennium computer to the share on the SERVER
the same operation (reading folder contents) took only a few seconds!!!!!!!

My question is: what can I do (configure) to make reading that shared folder
in a few seconds, not in minutes??????

Please, help me!!!

Kind regards,
Michal

 

[Aaron Kempf]

is it because you're trying to browse everything as a thumbnail.. Right?

I'd reccomend organizing your files into multiple sub folders-- nobody needs
to browse 10,000 files at the same time

and then I'd probably use some tool like Picasa that would do a better job
if I needed to do thumbnails

 

[Aaron Kempf]

you could just turn off the thumbnails