So for a while now, I had been having awful, nearly unusable performance as I attempted to navigate/browse the contents of a shared volume connected over SMB on a wi-fi connection. Sometimes it would take MINUTES to even display anything at all, and it never seemed to be caching any data because if you looked at some other folder and then went back to the first one, you would have to wait for it to list anything all over again.
I had suspected that the problem was primarily due this being over a wi-fi connection and I already had some other reasons to suspect that the wi-fi router in my new place was not a very good one. Eventually I relocated the device with the shared volume on it so it could be connected directly to the modem/router box provided by AT&T over Ethernet, in the hopes that while it might not eliminate ALL bandwidth-related sluggishness since my laptop would still be on wi-fi, maybe having the other device wired in would improve things partially. And at first I thought that might actually have worked, but it turned out that whatever it did right after I changed its location was some sort of fluke or I just imagined it, because it's continued to have awful, awful performance.
I also had suspected possibly it was something related to Apple's homegrown SMBX stack itself, possibly something you could correct for maybe by modifying your nsmb.conf file, but there is almost nothing online anywhere that offers any helpful info on just how you might modify it. The man page for it is fairly thorough in that it does give you lots of info about just what you COULD do, but didn't really offer much in the way of samples for different use cases.
I also suspected that it could have possibly need something due to the SMB implementation used by the device that was actually serving up this volume, which is a Nvidia Shield Pro TV set top box running a customized version of Android TV. No clue what codebase its SMB stack is based on, but since it's fundamentally an open source OS, I guess it might be safe to assume something derived from SAMBA. In any case, there is not really any way at all that I've been able to figure out where you could modify anything it was doing with respect to SMB sharing, so if it is flaw in their implementation or in the way it is configured, I don't think I would be able to change it. I did open a support ticket with Nvidia support but they weren't really able to make any suggestions.
I don't know how or why it happened, but just a little while ago I had an epiphany, and suddenly it occurred to me that the Finder's "Show Icon Preview" option was turned on, and that trying to browse folders containing even a few video files that had to be parsed one at a time on the fly in order to create these previews might actually be slowing things down, so I turned that open off, and wouldn't you know it, this horrible performance I had been suffering with for months and months was immediately resolved. Doh!!!
Here's actually my real question that I'm posting here to ask: So when you are customizing the View Options for any given folder, you see different options based on whether you are viewing it in icon, list, or column view. Now, in icon or list view, there is also an option to "Use As Default", which would take whatever settings you have set in the folder you're growing at that moment and apply them to all other folders universally. This seems to me like another way of saying that for all intents and purposes, in icon and list mode, your view settings preferences can be set on a folder-by-folder basis. However, I do EVERYTHING almost entirely in Column View. Don't ask me why, I realize only a tiny minority of Mac users seem to even realize Column View exists, let alone how to get around In it, but I took a liking to it way back when Mac OS X first came out and have been using it as my default for 20 years now. Anyway, it turns out that in column views, that "Use As Default" option vanishes. Therefore, if you want to tell Finder NOT to display preview icon on certain folders specifically because they contain large numbers of video files that have to individually parsed to generate the preview icon each and every time you navigate to that folder, AND the connection to and from the volume is over SMB or via w-fi and possibly way slower than a local drive, you are more or less choosing to turn off the "Show Icon Preview" functionality globally for all folders everywhere, even though you really only would like to not do it on those few folders where it is a major performance drain. I have been doing a bit of online sleuthing to try and find out whether or not there is any sort of trick, hack, defaults option you can apply, the use or absence of a .DS_Store flle, etc etc etc, that you could implement so that you could maintain the global default of Show Icon Preview but get it blocked from happening on the specific folders you want it blocked on, and I haven't figured anything out yet.
I guess the real reason I am posting all of this is to ask whether anyone knows of any particular technique by which one could get around these limitations, i.e something that would disable icon previews for any volume as defined as a network volume, the same way that you can make a change to block .DS_Store files from being generated on a network volume, or some other technique that would allow you to define the view options on a folder-by-folder basis, perhaps similar to how you can customize all aspects of directory display on an Apache web server through a combination of tons of global rules along with individual files that you place into specific folders any time you want to give it options different from the globally defined ones.
Honestly it really isn't all that often that I really need the ability to have icon previews for like 95% of the folders I ever look at, the exception of course being my massive folder where I save all the best memes I stumble across and want to keep for possible future use at some point. I guess I should just keep icon previews turned off all the time and whoever I go to my memes folder, just change to icon view and be done with it.
LOL
Curious to see whether anybody has any ideas.
Pete
I had suspected that the problem was primarily due this being over a wi-fi connection and I already had some other reasons to suspect that the wi-fi router in my new place was not a very good one. Eventually I relocated the device with the shared volume on it so it could be connected directly to the modem/router box provided by AT&T over Ethernet, in the hopes that while it might not eliminate ALL bandwidth-related sluggishness since my laptop would still be on wi-fi, maybe having the other device wired in would improve things partially. And at first I thought that might actually have worked, but it turned out that whatever it did right after I changed its location was some sort of fluke or I just imagined it, because it's continued to have awful, awful performance.
I also had suspected possibly it was something related to Apple's homegrown SMBX stack itself, possibly something you could correct for maybe by modifying your nsmb.conf file, but there is almost nothing online anywhere that offers any helpful info on just how you might modify it. The man page for it is fairly thorough in that it does give you lots of info about just what you COULD do, but didn't really offer much in the way of samples for different use cases.
I also suspected that it could have possibly need something due to the SMB implementation used by the device that was actually serving up this volume, which is a Nvidia Shield Pro TV set top box running a customized version of Android TV. No clue what codebase its SMB stack is based on, but since it's fundamentally an open source OS, I guess it might be safe to assume something derived from SAMBA. In any case, there is not really any way at all that I've been able to figure out where you could modify anything it was doing with respect to SMB sharing, so if it is flaw in their implementation or in the way it is configured, I don't think I would be able to change it. I did open a support ticket with Nvidia support but they weren't really able to make any suggestions.
I don't know how or why it happened, but just a little while ago I had an epiphany, and suddenly it occurred to me that the Finder's "Show Icon Preview" option was turned on, and that trying to browse folders containing even a few video files that had to be parsed one at a time on the fly in order to create these previews might actually be slowing things down, so I turned that open off, and wouldn't you know it, this horrible performance I had been suffering with for months and months was immediately resolved. Doh!!!
Here's actually my real question that I'm posting here to ask: So when you are customizing the View Options for any given folder, you see different options based on whether you are viewing it in icon, list, or column view. Now, in icon or list view, there is also an option to "Use As Default", which would take whatever settings you have set in the folder you're growing at that moment and apply them to all other folders universally. This seems to me like another way of saying that for all intents and purposes, in icon and list mode, your view settings preferences can be set on a folder-by-folder basis. However, I do EVERYTHING almost entirely in Column View. Don't ask me why, I realize only a tiny minority of Mac users seem to even realize Column View exists, let alone how to get around In it, but I took a liking to it way back when Mac OS X first came out and have been using it as my default for 20 years now. Anyway, it turns out that in column views, that "Use As Default" option vanishes. Therefore, if you want to tell Finder NOT to display preview icon on certain folders specifically because they contain large numbers of video files that have to individually parsed to generate the preview icon each and every time you navigate to that folder, AND the connection to and from the volume is over SMB or via w-fi and possibly way slower than a local drive, you are more or less choosing to turn off the "Show Icon Preview" functionality globally for all folders everywhere, even though you really only would like to not do it on those few folders where it is a major performance drain. I have been doing a bit of online sleuthing to try and find out whether or not there is any sort of trick, hack, defaults option you can apply, the use or absence of a .DS_Store flle, etc etc etc, that you could implement so that you could maintain the global default of Show Icon Preview but get it blocked from happening on the specific folders you want it blocked on, and I haven't figured anything out yet.
I guess the real reason I am posting all of this is to ask whether anyone knows of any particular technique by which one could get around these limitations, i.e something that would disable icon previews for any volume as defined as a network volume, the same way that you can make a change to block .DS_Store files from being generated on a network volume, or some other technique that would allow you to define the view options on a folder-by-folder basis, perhaps similar to how you can customize all aspects of directory display on an Apache web server through a combination of tons of global rules along with individual files that you place into specific folders any time you want to give it options different from the globally defined ones.
Honestly it really isn't all that often that I really need the ability to have icon previews for like 95% of the folders I ever look at, the exception of course being my massive folder where I save all the best memes I stumble across and want to keep for possible future use at some point. I guess I should just keep icon previews turned off all the time and whoever I go to my memes folder, just change to icon view and be done with it.
LOL
Curious to see whether anybody has any ideas.
Pete
