Slow browsing on shared drives with lots of files and directories - Found source!

[Eric Fortier]

Hi all,

After quite a bit of frustration trying to figure out why Vista business RTM is
incredibly slow when browsing shared drives, I have found the cause of this
behavior.

On the server I have several directories containing *tons* of files, totalling
more than 250.000 in the directories I use daily. These are files I need for
various projects I'm running. Here is the directory layout:

Projects
- Project1
- - src
- - bin
- - data
- Project2
- - src
- - bin
- - data
- SharedData1
- SharedData2

etc, etc. The SharedData directories are mostly those with tons of files in
them.

Now. When I dig into one of projects directories, Vista insists on querying all
other directories on the same level. For example, if I enter "Project1", Vista
will query Project2, SharedData1, SharedData2, etc.

I noticed this because when a directory has not yet been queried by Vista, the
"expand" arrow is always present, even on directories with no sub directories.
As Vista queries a directory, I see the "expand" arrows disappear on those
directories without children. The querying of a directory with many, many files
takes a very long time.

Now that I noticed this I can follow what Vista does, but it usually takes
several minutes (up to 5) before all the directories (14 total) gets queries.
During that time I *can* move in directories, but none of them get expanded and
pressing on the expand arrow does nothing until Vista is done.

Anyone experienced this behavior too? Is there something I can do to improve or
disable the querying? I tried all suggestions proposed in this newsgroup
without success (including messing around with the "autotuninglevel").

My network is not slow as I get great throughput when copying or using files.
And changing the structure of the directories is /not/ something I can do at
this time.

BTW, WinXP doesn't have this behavior and I can navigate the directories at
full speed. But Vista is so much better that I can't go back! I wont! But I
still want to eat the whole cake and get the speed of XP in Vista

Thanks for any suggestions...

 

[Kerry Brown]

Did you upgrade from XP or do a clean install? I don't know if it's related
but I have experienced the exact same problem with XP when upgrading from
Windows 98. A clean install fixed the problem. It's unlikely to be the same
thing but it'd be interesting if you had done an upgrade instead of a clean
install.

 

[Eric Fortier]

Did you upgrade from XP or do a clean install? I don't know if it's related
but I have experienced the exact same problem with XP when upgrading from
Windows 98. A clean install fixed the problem. It's unlikely to be the same
thing but it'd be interesting if you had done an upgrade instead of a clean
install.

I didn't upgrade. Clean install straight out of the box, so to speak.

It would indeed have been interesting if I had. But that would have been way
too easy!