Anyone seeing any benefits of the new APFS file system? I'm not.

[baryon]

Supposedly calculating things like disk space should be much faster. Often I still find myself waiting hours in front of a "Get Info" window with "Calculating" displayed at the top before it tells me. Often a folder that I just copied one or two gigabytes of data to will show "Zero Kb" for several hours until it finally realizes how big the files are. This makes is hard to judge whether I can send files on WeTransfer or whatever. It's often nice to know how big files are. Well I find that I can only rarely find out what size files are unless I have 4 hours to spare while it figures it out.

My system doesn't seem faster either. What exactly does APFS do better that can actually be felt in the real world?

MacBook Pro Late 2013 Retina (500 GB SSD).

 

[fisherking]

it may be worth exploring these issues, something isn't right; may not be the file system. meanwhile, some info: https://www.cultofmac.com/435718/apfs-new-apple-file-system/

 

[Meltber]

My MacBook's free size is up nearly 2-3 GB, when I upgraded HFS+ to APFS. If you have the calculating free size problem, you can check out this link. It works for me when I was in Sierra.

 

[BLUEDOG314]

My MacBook's free size is up nearly 2-3 GB, when I upgraded HFS+ to APFS. If you have the calculating free size problem, you can check out this link. It works for me when I was in Sierra.

While this is very useful in certain situations, I don't believe in this instance it would have an effect on baryon's issue. Indexing to my understanding is OS level and a function of finder, and it doesn't really have anything to do with the filesystem.

As with any other filesystem change, there will be some time for the kinks to work out. HFS is something like 30 years old with patchwork over time to make it usable on modern machines. While I agree with you, there are various instances where the fast directory sizing feature seems to actually take longer than HFS+, I think it will be worked out, and APFS is definitely much better.

IMO some of the best features and abilities of APFS are that partitions inside an apfs container can share the containers whole size and are free to be resized, and also the ability to clone APFS containers with ease. I have certain personal documents and banking stuff on my computer that warrants encryption, and while I could encrypt the whole machine, I just broke off a new partition and encrypted it, and it has the ability to grow or shrink as needed when I add things.

There are also other fundamental things that when used by developers will speed up the machine as well. The way I understand it, HFS only actually allows one thread to make directory changes at a time. Most programs are multi threaded these days and all threads should be able to write data to storage simultaneously. When this is taken advantage of, we could see a big performance boost in applications.