blog: grinding halt

[nikos]

here's the comment area for today's blog post found at
http://zabkat.com/blog/why-is-xplorer2-slow.htm

[kunkel321]

Good info... Thanks for writing this Nikos.

It would be interesting to have a list of column types and/or file/folder attributes that were ordered by most-likely-to-be-sluggish, to most-likely-to-be-fastest. I don't mean that the list should be built in to x2, just that one of our local geek types (yes you K) might post some suggestions as a reply here. Checksums and folder size obviously would be slow. Seems like file name patterns would be the fastest, since that is info that gets called for display every time anyway...

[nikos]

name/size/date are fast, everything else is slower

[Kilmatead]

...(yes you K) might post some suggestions as a reply here...

K says buy an SSD (a good one, not a cheap one - as with all tech, you get what you pay for - do not look for bargains).

Job done. End of story. <EOF> Not quite everything will tabulate instantly (CPU has a lot to do with it too as x2 spawns worker threads), but the controller disc I/O for column population essentially becomes a meaningless factor.

They're silent, too. Kind of neat watching them thrash in total silence. Just like screaming in space. It probably can't even be called thrashing anymore, technically, but the idea's the same. They are not quite the quantum leap people expect them to be, but they do render the question of hardware-slowdown irrelevant - so the rest is up to software (x2) suckling on the NTFS teat itself. Funny how Nikos left that bit out ("I cannot bend the laws of physics." No, but in essence the user definitely can, and that puts the ball back in his notorious court of wonky workarounds).

Won't do much for the slow network brigade, but that's a different story. If you had all just gone with Tesla instead of that grubby and unimaginative Edison fella, the fundamentals of what networking actually is would have been conceived of a whole lot differently in the first place.

[FrizzleFry]

Windows Defender (the built in anti-virus in Windows 8.x) really slows x2 on startup because of custom icons... switching to a different AV helped a lot...

[RightPaddock]

Couple of things I've noticed that can make x2 slower.

Browsing folders in Detail mode, with the Contents [S] column enabled. If the folder contains more than a few .zip files, and/or the zip files contain many items, it can take time to count the items in the zips. Not sure what does the counting (x2, Windows or the designated .zip handler - don't really care either), but as with many things if you understand why something happens its less like to be 'annoying'.

USB drives that have gone to sleep can cause startup delays of some seconds. But if a tab is 'mapped' to a USB drive and the drive is powered down the tab shows the Desktop immediately Pity there's no way to do that for network drives, but I understand why it's not doable.

If you use the previewer, and you land on something that requires a handler like WMP, then that can slow things down. If you want to restrict what file types get previewed, then:

* Optional registry options szQVDraftExtList and szQVNativeExtList (see REGISTRY.TXT) control what extensions will get previewed for the Draft and Native preview tab respectively. So if you want to get just previews of JPG and TXT files in draft mode set szQVDraftExtList to "jpg,txt" (comma separated list of extensions, NO wildcards). These are layout specific, not for the global section. You can even have exclusion lists, e.g. "-jpg,-txt" will preview anything BUT jpg/txt.

...buy an SSD (a good one, not a cheap one - as with all tech, you get what you pay for - do not look for bargains).

Nirvana is almost attainable if the ssd is on a PCIe card - by definition not cheap. Also frees up a disk bay.

I've replaced several external USB2.0/SATA housings with a USB3.0 adapter and USB3.0/SATA disk dock. This made an appreciable difference to performance, not only to x2, anything that uses an external drive, e.g. a Macrium incremental backup that once took 5-10 minutes now takes 2-3 minutes. Plus less cables and power adapters, and offsite storage of backup disks is much more convenient.

RP

[Kilmatead]

Nirvana is almost attainable if the ssd is on a PCIe card - by definition not cheap. Also frees up a disk bay.

PCIe will become the norm soon, since Samsung's proven the 3D V-NAND consumer-grade architecture saturates even a 6GB/s SATA without blinking, so there's nowhere else to go really, except to start using the motherboard slots. Technically speaking, such high transfer rates only occur on sustained throughput (transferring of large contiguous files) - 99% of most people's day to day processing takes place in the IOPS stressing realm of non-sequential access, so lower latency (in the drive itself) is more effective than raw bandwidth (the motherboard) when ultimately putting butter on their toast.

As I'm still using an old 3GB/s (Sata II) drive connection, I looked into converting up to a 6+ via PCIe, but found this article most illuminating - worth reading (and rather reassuring) for anyone still on the old controller architecture.

e.g. a Macrium incremental backup that once took 5-10 minutes now takes 2-3 minutes.

Yeah, tell me about it - I still use an old mechanical drive to store the images for destination (thus write-speed is significantly reduced), but there's something comforting when the Macrium log tells me that:

I/O Performance: Read 204.7 MB/s - Write 101.3 MB/s

Which probably explains why cream-cheese is more popular on a bagel than peanut-butter.

[nikos]

Windows Defender (the built in anti-virus in Windows 8.x) really slows x2 on startup because of custom icons... switching to a different AV helped a lot...

antivirus programs always play havoc -- the most weird support issues are always down to some AV. But how can you tell that it was the icons that caused the problem? probably it was checking x2 altogether

[FrizzleFry]

Windows Defender (the built in anti-virus in Windows 8.x) really slows x2 on startup because of custom icons... switching to a different AV helped a lot...

antivirus programs always play havoc -- the most weird support issues are always down to some AV. But how can you tell that it was the icons that caused the problem? probably it was checking x2 altogether

I guess I don't know for sure it's the custom icons but it made a big difference using my settings with many user commands defined compared to default settings...

[kunkel321]

Thanks K and All, for the geekilicous replies.
Q: What of custom icons? (as some of you might guess, I'm partial to them ) Is there a way to optimize this? It seems like, if I make my custom icons with only the needed sub-sizes (16x16, 32x32, etc.) and if I put them right in the /zabkat/ program folder, that maybe they would be easier for x2 to find (??)
Or is it simply the fact that I'm forcing x2 to look at all for the custom icons, that can potentially cause a delay?

[nikos]

no custom icons are fast

[Kilmatead]

I would be amazed if anyone could actually discern a "real" delay genuinely attributable to custom icons - at least anyone running x2 on a machine faster than a spotty teenager with a broken skateboard, and even then only if they had more than a few hundred custom icons. This is rather like what happened after the Lord of the Rings films came out... every silly film-goer would see Orcs around every corner just waiting to lob off their cranial lobes. If Nikos had never scare-mongered it, no one would have ever imagined it as a possible cause of global warming.

The worst start-up offender is always going to be some pseudo-clever AV/Firewall "heuristic" routine that was programmed by the above spotty teenager, if not the Orc itself. Kaspersky, Comodo, Malewarebytes, et al are guilty of this sort of thing, and so proud of it that they convince their users that such claptrap is actually doing something - "oh my, x2 is trying to inject heroin into the veins of the shell", not realising that Heroin is actually just a pure form of Morphine and that most heroin addicts are actually quite healthy (and curiously friendly) people. God save the Orcs from the imaginary fears of housewives.

Interesting enough, the ever popular Classic Shell start menu includes a couple of options to allow/disallow pre-caching of icons (as well as a confusingly entitled one to allow/disallow the pre-loading of icons). The gist is the same - all in aid of making sure the start menu opens faster, at the expense of a few slightly delayed icons being visibly rendered. Again, mostly hokum of course, except for those trying to load a few hundred icons on hardware better suited to a phone.

(Look at it this way, anyone can write a script that can extract and allocate a hundred icons [via the API] from custom-files in a couple of seconds - if a script can do it, then a proper C routine can do it before the user can hear his own coughing as he dies of CO2 poisoning. Red herrings and orcs: The scourge of the paranoid user-base.)

And no, I don't believe in humble opinions when it comes to sweating the small-stuff. If x2 is that demonstrably and appreciably slow with custom icons, I'll personally spit into the wind and tug on superman's cape just to bait the devil into a knicker-twisting bate of his own.

[Gary M. Mugford]

The worst start-up offender is always going to be some pseudo-clever AV/Firewall "heuristic" routine that was programmed by the above spotty teenager, if not the Orc itself. Kaspersky, Comodo, Malewarebytes, et al are guilty of this sort of thing, and so proud of it that they convince their users that such claptrap is actually doing something - "oh my, x2 is trying to inject heroin into the veins of the shell", not realising that Heroin is actually just a pure form of Morphine and that most heroin addicts are actually quite healthy (and curiously friendly) people. God save the Orcs from the imaginary fears of housewives.

Milord, haven't been back here in a good while, but I happened upon this particular remark only a night after watching Bill Maher interview Johann Hari about drugs and mostly heroin in particular. He's got a new book out on the matter and he surprised me with several of his statistics and observations, including exploding the myth about heroin's supposed ability to almost immediately create an addiction for itself. Now, don't get me wrong, Hari's trustworthiness is at a microscopic level. He's a proven ... let's call it being a fictionalist in a world of non-fiction. But what he says SEEMS to make sense. I'm currently not enjoying taking a fair bit of pain medication. Never considered H and that won't ever change. But will the doctors treating me shoot me full of the medically-pure stuff under a different name? Yeah, it's possible. At that point, I'll be hoping Hari's new career as a teller of the truth will include his book, Chasing the Scream.

GM

[Kilmatead]

Much of what people "learn" from biased news institutions is questionable... especially when it suits the political agenda de jour... remember 25 years ago when "crack" was the most addictive thing on the planet, and "so much worse" than regular Cocaine? It turns out the only difference between the two is that Crack (not to be confused with the Irish/Scots 'craic') has added baking-soda to give it that solid-feel. Same stuff in the end though - who knew that baking soda was apparently so evil and addictive? Sold in every good village grocer's shop. Tsk. Tsk. Etymologically speaking, Craic is (contrary to popular opinion) not actually a Gaelic word at all, it's just a different spelling of the other, with cultural connotations intact... as a third of the population of New York suffers both umbrage and relief at the same time.

But, just to keep those New York types honest, technically speaking Heroin is a "little" different from Morphine...



vs.



...but what's a molecule here or there between friends? The important thing to remember is that neither of them will do any actual damage to the human body - Heroin just gets a bad rap because its advocates aren't picky about needles, and so introduce other issues into the otherwise healthy mix. Same plant, and all natural. Horticulture will no doubt be the doom of the species.

Not like the particularly enjoyable LSD... that stuff is pure chemical. And lasts a long time too, so you really get your money's worth. Not great for pain-regulation though... it tends to amplify, not deaden...