file sharing painfully slow

[Chris Murphy]

On Mar 23, 2007, at 12:12 AM, LuKreme wrote:

> On 22-Mar-2007, at 15:16, Scott Ribe wrote:
>>> In short, it's not a bug in the finder, it's a PEBKAC issue.
>>
>> There is absolutely no need to download THE SAME ICON 900 times  
>> for 900
>> files with identical type/creator/extension and no custom icons.
>
> Well, I doubt that is actually what is happening.  What is almost  
> certainly happening is that the Finder is checking every file for  
> file type, 'magic' info, comments, labels, custom icons, contents,  
> and other metadata that might be needed to sort the list view  
> properly.

That simply doesn't fit the facts. In column view, it's taking  
roughly 4 minutes to display 900 items with icons, and the Finder  
beach balls. Turning off "show icons" again in column view and the  
files display instantly and the Finder never becomes unusable.

> First it's amusing|amazing|preternatural how often Chris is right  
> and everyone else is wrong, isn't it?

Actually, no, not everyone else is wrong. There are quite a few other  
people who are recognizing the problem and seeing it as the  
incredibly silly and annoying problem as it in fact is. And then  
there are some people from the lunatic asylum who are defending a  
useless Finder beach balling for 5 minutes as good and appropriate  
behavior.

>   Second, Windows provides nearly no metadata, does not examine  
> contents of files, support labels, or do anything other than rely  
> on an extension to determine file type and icon.  OF COURSE it's  
> going to be faster as it's doing a couple of orders of magnitude less.

It's still doing more than column view. I can still see generic icons  
(which I could care less about, but I can have them with Windows),  
and I can still sort by file size and creation date. And it's VASTLY  
faster than the Finder in the same exact situation.

> If you have a problem with list view then DON'T USE IT.  It  
> provides many benefits over the other views, but those benefits do  
> come at a price, especially over a low-end broadband connection  
> with high latency like DSL. FOr me, I hardly ever use list view in  
> any window, except one specific network mount.  It usually has  
> 250-300 items visible (with a couple of folders nested open), is  
> sorted by date, and isn't slow at all.  But it's a 10bT connection  
> to the server.

The problem occurs with column view as well. So it's not about the  
benefits of list view over column view as it is clearly the Finder  
asking for icons it really doesn't need, let alone duplicated as many  
times as it is.

> I suspect the issue is the latency between your machine and the  
> server and nothing to do with OS X at all.  What are your ping  
> times to the remote server?  (My average is 50-80ms).

90ms average


> What takes a long time is icon view of a folder with a few hundred  
> images and previews enabled.  But that's to be expected, no?

It's not expected, nor is the Finder beachballing if I want to do  
anything else while waiting for icons to load in. The icons aren't  
custom. And they're all the same. So it's beyond incredible to me  
that it should take this amount of time.

Once again, the difference in time between column view and list view  
isn't much (with icons on); so it can't be blamed on all this other  
metadata being requested.

Chris Murphy
Color Remedies (TM)
New York, NY
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Co-author "Real World Color Management, 2nd Ed"