Whenever I access a share from a Windows 7 machine I experience long waiting times. When I click the share in sometime folders are listed instantly, sometime a slowly growing green bar appears at the top of and finally the listing of folders appears. When entering a folder almost always the same green bar appears first, then after 15-30 seconds the contents of the folder appears.

 

Has any of you the same experience and found a solution? Might be a Windows "feature" or is it drives spinning up?

You are probably experiencing the thumbnail feature of windows. It reads each file in the folder to generate a thumbnail. In order to read the files, the drives must be spun up, even if the filenames are cached.

I use a Windows 7 Pro PC to access my unRAID shares often. I have several shares mapped to drive letters, but don't see any difference when I browse an unmapped share.

 

Occasionally, if the unRAID drives are spun down there is a delay of a few secs while it spins the drive up, but even then I rarely get that since I have cache_dirs.

 

Recently, I unzipped some of the newznab backfill archives... & yes then I got a green bar while Windows tried to access the directories containing several thousand files... which is what I expected.

 

Some questions for you:

 

1) How many objects are in the directories that take a while to show up (that have the green progress bar)?

2) Do you use cache_dirs? (It helps store in RAM some things to make browsing quicker)

3) Do you have other systems on your network that can access the unRAID shares without delay (& I don't mean right after you tried to access it with Windows)?

4) Have you looked at your unRAID logs when this happens? Are there any errors?

This has been a Problem with Windows 7 for quite a while.  I read a suggestion to help with the problem that you might want to try.

 

Right click on the unRAID share that is giving you the problem.

 

Select 'Properties' .  Then select the 'Customize' tab.

 

Set the dropdown box to 'Documents' and click on the 'Apply to... Subfolders' box.

 

Click on 'Apply' and then 'Ok'