Long subfolder opening durations

[Ray Pixley]

For some reason, it takes a long time for a folder window to open certain
sub-folders in XP SP3. Task manager says its "not responding", but after a
while it does respond. The hard disk formatted is NTFS, while the $MFT file
may have nothing to do with it, Diskeeper 2008 says it is made up of 2
fragments. Other sub-folders open right away. Can anything be done to speed
the process up?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

For some reason, it takes a long time for a folder window to open certain
sub-folders in XP SP3. Task manager says its "not responding", but after
a
while it does respond. The hard disk formatted is NTFS, while the $MFT
file
may have nothing to do with it, Diskeeper 2008 says it is made up of 2
fragments. Other sub-folders open right away. Can anything be done to
speed
the process up?

How many files do you have in the problem folder?

 

[Ray Pixley]

Please accept my apolgies for taking so long to get back to you.

The folder has 3,624 files in 41 folders. I also have an extensive Excel
files with hyperlinks to those files plus many more, so I'm resistant to
moving them around and breaking the links. A lot of those files are
multi-page tif files and it contains 1,621 shortcuts to those tif files, the
latter because sorting or finding a particular one can be difficult. For
what its worth, the shortcuts are not hyperlinked in Excel. I've tried the
new Windows Search, the one with the hourglass icon in the system tray, which
indexes them, but unfortunately found that very misleading.

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

3600 files is well within the number of files that NTFS can handle without
incurring a speed penalty.

In many cases the reason for long access delays is one or several bad
clusters on the disk. The Event Viewer (eventvwr.exe) would log them. If you
have bad clusters then you should do this:
1. Back up all important files, including your EMail files.
2. Check if the backups are complete and readable.
3. Using diskmgmt.msc, check the disk. Let it check for bad clusters too!

If no bad clusters are reported and since other folders are unaffected by
the problem, I suggest you try a pragmatic solution:
1. Rename the problem folder to "xxx.bad" (i.e. append the word "bad" to its
name).
2. Copy the contents of xxx.bad to xxx (i.e. to the original folder name).

 

[Ray Pixley]

I didn't see any log entries. I used Start-Run-eventvwr.exe and checked the
5 logs listed. The only evening events logged were for an outgoing fax. I
tried to force the error again, but still no log entries. Backups will take
awhile.

 

[Ray Pixley]

I just tried the rename folder as *.bad and copy to a new folder, but both
are now just as slow as before. For what its worth, when I use Paperport,
the speed is normally fast, as fast as windows was out of the box, but I
can't always use Paperport to navigate that folder, I wish I could, so I
still need to use windows to navigate the folders. Is it possible it's the
windows directory itself, and if so how can that be fixed? For instance, can
the MFT be defragged or optimized? Can it be identified as the problem, even
if there is no solution? I also noticed that some of the thumb files are
hugh, with some approaching 100Mbs. (I don't know how much Paperport
piggybacks on window's folder system, but presumeably it has to heavily
relies on it; otherwise if something dramatically changes in the way windows
handles that process, too little dependence by PP on Windows may cause PP to
misbehave. So why would PP be OK, and windows slow?)

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

You need to approach this issue in an analytical way. Since your other
folders are OK, you are in an excellent position to approach the issue one
step at a time. Here is what you could do:
1. Empty the .bad folder.
2. Copy about 100 files from the problem folder to the
.bad folder, then check its access time.
3. Copy another 200 files, then check its access time again.
etc.

At what time do you experience the long delays? Are they gradually building
up? If so then what happens when you do this:

4. Click Start / Run / cmd {OI}
5. Type these commands:
md c:\TestFolder
for /L %a in (1,1,4000) do @echo. c:\TestFolder\Test%a.txt
(This command will take a little while to execute)
6. You now have a folder c:\TestFolder with 4,000 files inside.
Is it fast or slow to access?

 

[Ray Pixley]

I got some results.

First, what didn't work: while Steps 4 to 6 appeared to be creating some
files in c:\testfolder, none of them showed up nor could the search companion
find them.

On steps 1 to 3, I found three (out of 8) subfolders all having the same
slow symptoms. What was common to all three, but not the others, was the
presence of shortcuts. First, let me describe the folder structure and what
I'm trying to accomplish with this structure:

Each problem subfolder, which we will call subfolder1, etc. have several
sub-sub folders, which we will call 2005, 2006, 2007 and SC. The 2005, etc.
folders, contain scanned documents, where the start of the document names are
the document's dates (ymd) followed by their serial number. In the SC
folder, the short cut names are the document's serial number followed the
document's date. (Before suggesting sorting using the other directory
parameters, please be advised that usual windows file info dates, such as the
date created, the date last modified, etc. are useless for this kind of
sorting purpose since they are paper documents received from others that need
to be sorted both by serial number and by the date of the document, not the
date it was scanned.) I need the shortcuts since I sometimes want to leave
notes on the document, having to manage two copies to make sure both have the
same note, etc. is too prone to error. Before using them, I had a hard time
finding the file I wanted.

The smallest of the three problem folders had only 116 files, of which 21
were shortcuts, 6 subfolders, and occupies 9.30 Mb of disk space. I'm
probably as surprised as you are on how little this is, but it is definitely
very slow to respond. On the plus side, it is at least a reasonable size to
use to investigate this behavior. The folder with the most files and
shortcuts contains 2,380 of them.

If I take away the subfolder with the shortcuts, the response time improves
considerably. Why? That doesn't make any sense! What can be done to get
rid of this bad performance?

 

[Pegasus \(MVP\)]

We're rapidly getting into murky waters. My attempts at getting you to
establish a tightly defined test environment failed, perhaps because of a
typographical error. The symptoms you describe run contrary to what is known
about Windows, hence there must be something lurking on your machine that
you haven't mentioned so far. What it is I do not know. It could be a very
large number of hidden files, or malware, or a virus. I can see the
following options, listed in order of preference:
a) Ask a suitably qualified person to examine your machine.
b) Re-install PaperPort.
c) Re-install Windows and all applications.
d) Live with the problem.
e) Let me have a look at your machine.
If you wish to consider Option e), send a note to pegasus_fnlATyahooDOTcom
within the next three days.

 

[Ray Pixley]

I'll send an off-line email.

We're rapidly getting into murky waters. My attempts at getting you to
establish a tightly defined test environment failed, perhaps because of a
typographical error. The symptoms you describe run contrary to what is known
about Windows, hence there must be something lurking on your machine that
you haven't mentioned so far. What it is I do not know. It could be a very
large number of hidden files, or malware, or a virus. I can see the
following options, listed in order of preference:
a) Ask a suitably qualified person to examine your machine.
b) Re-install PaperPort.
c) Re-install Windows and all applications.
d) Live with the problem.
e) Let me have a look at your machine.
If you wish to consider Option e), send a note to pegasus_fnlATyahooDOTcom
within the next three days.