Slow Windows File Explorer browse shares

[flic]

Hey there,

 

There is a SMB share on my server with over 6,000 folders in it
Recently, browsing this folder has become very slow to the point of seeing the green progress timer in Windows File Explorer for 60 seconds before it finally stops. Same situation if I hit F5 Refresh. It goes again with the green progress timer for 60 seconds...

First I thought it was Windows, tested with 11 Pro desktop, 11 Home laptop and 7 Ultimate in a VM, but same long delay on all of those.

The share resides on brand new 7200 rpm, 512MB cache, 14TB Western Digital Ultrastar DC HC530

 

A duplicate of the share was created on TrueNAS and browsing that dup share with the same above Windows clients take under 1 second to display. Not even seeing the green progress at all

Please, let me know if you need +info

 

Any help to solve my issue would be much appreciated

 

Thank you

 

[JorgeB]

If the share is only on one disk try using the disk path instead to compare, you need to enable disk shares first.

[flic]

Disk shares is instantaneous! well, under 1 second to display all 6,000+ subfolders. nice

not so nice is the fact that I cannot rename "disk1" to something else

Any ideas to apply the same settings to User Shares?
 

Edited August 15, 2023 by flic

[JorgeB]

Using a disk share bypasses FUSE, so it's much faster, especially when dealing with large amounts of files/folders, but it can only be used if a share uses a single disk or a pool, see also exclusive shares for pools.

[flic]

got it! but FUSE was changed recently to cause the speed degradation
cant say exactly when it happened but it wasnt taking a full 60 SECONDS to access the share before

 

anyways, thanks for your help Jorge

[itimpi]

Might want to see if adding

preserve case = yes

to the Samba global setting to see if it speeds things up in folders with lots of files.    There used to be an option for this in the GUI but it seems to have disappeared so maybe it can have undesirable side-effects.

[flic]

itimpi, thanks for the tip
 

I've put your setting in smb-extra.conf in the config folder on the flash drive and restarted the array

but same slow result

 

 

[JorgeB]

13 hours ago, flic said:

but FUSE was changed recently to cause the speed degradation

Over the years speed usually degrades a little with each new kernel, likely also related to Samba security patches, though there are some exceptions.

[flic]

a "little"? It takes over 60 SECONDS to complete the folder opening. thats not a little

 

anyway, thanks for your help JorgeB

[JorgeB]

21 minutes ago, flic said:

a "little"?

I meant a little compared with the previous release, not with disk shares, using FUSE was always considerably slower vs disk shares, but with each new kernel/Samba release it gets a little slower, sometimes 5% or so, sometimes more.