TC freezes inside folder with hundreds of thousands of files, but Explorer works ok... :shock:

[jesped]

I'm doing some AI Upscaling with TOPAZ Video Enhance, which outputs jpg, png or tif file frames. Working with a 2 hours+ source video files you end up with several hundred thousands of files in a folder.
Well, when I enter any of those folders in Total Commander it freezes for many many seconds for some reason. It doesn't matter if it is on Brief, Full or Thumbnail display. And even when it finally gives me back control after like half a minute or so, it goes back to freezing again when I do some scrolling...

I just don't know what the hell it is doing... I open the exact same folder in Windows Explorer and everything works perfectly smooth and fine. Even in the large icons mode, while it's generating thumbnails for each file... it doesn't freeze or stall at all, I can perfectly scroll through the whole thousands of files, make selections, whatever...

[ghisler(Author)]

You can disable the automatic refresh when returning to Total Commander from another app:
Configuration - Options - Refresh, add the drive letter to "No refresh for these drives".
You will then have to press F2 or Ctrl+R to refresh a directory.
I recommend that you enable the options in the lower part of "Configuration - Options - Refresh" in this case to see files added outside of TC.

[jesped]

It's not about refresh. I can refresh in Explorer at any time and it is instantaneously responsive, even while generating thumbnails... what is Total Commander doing that makes it freeze that much compared to Explorer?

[Dalai]

Anti-virus software?

Regards
Dalai

[jesped]

Nope. They are all jpg, png or tif images, and my antivirus is disabled... but the most weird whing is... Windows Explorer works perfectly smooth and fine inside those folders. It doesn't freezes at all, even while generating thumbnails in the "Large Icons" view...

It just doesn't make any sense to me that Total Commander freezes that bad while the shitty Windows Explorer works perfectly smooth...

[Dalai]

Maybe analyze with Sysinternals Process Monitor what is happening while TC is frozen, or take a closer look at its process with Process Explorer or Process Hacker.

BTW, it doesn't matter what kind of files are shown in TC. Even pictures are subject to any anti-virus scan. Also keep in mind that disabling the scanner doesn't always mean it's really disabled, it might just doesn't report anything anymore but is still scanning. Perhaps it's easier to try the same thing you were doing with your files in Windows Safe Mode. That way, there's no way of any interference by anti-virus software - or most of background software, for that matter. If TC doesn't freeze there, it's something on your system, some background program, driver or similar.

Regards
Dalai

[petermad]

2jesped
Maybe you have some content-plugin running in TC which slows things down.

Is TC also freezing if you start it with a fresh ini file?

[ghisler(Author)]

Could you try to set the icon mode to "All associated" in Configuration - Options - Icons? And turn off overlay icons? some of these are loaded by shell extensions.

[jesped]

Could you try to set the icon mode to "All associated" in Configuration - Options - Icons? And turn off overlay icons? some of these are loaded by shell extensions.

I had it in "All associated + EXE". I set it to "All associated" but there's no change.

Image: https://i.imgur.com/D4gZCdj.png

Even with "No icons" it behaves exactly the same.

I recorded a video of the issue:

https://youtu.be/9A8O5OyzveI

As you can see, just entering the folder takes 11 seconds (00:00:07 to 00:00:18), and then just moving around you can see how sluggish the tracking of the cursor over the files are, and the general unresponsiveness trying to use the scrollbars, changing from one view mode to another, etc.

Changing from Full view mode to Brief took a mindboggling one minute and 3 seconds ( 00:00:23 to 00:01:26 ).

Meanwhile in Windows Explorer... https://youtu.be/0OIfnVK0fWc

[Dalai]

Do I see this right that the cursor/caret following the mouse is lagging behind? Does TC (inadvertently) run in some kind of sandbox or something? Did you try the same in Windows Safe Mode as I suggested?

Regards
Dalai

[jesped]

Do I see this right that the cursor/caret following the mouse is lagging behind? Does TC (inadvertently) run in some kind of sandbox or something? Did you try the same in Windows Safe Mode as I suggested?

That's right, it lags behind most of the time, and then freezes, and lags, and freezes...

It's all the same in Safe Mode and even deleting wincmd.ini and starting fresh. Disabled all plugins.

Exactly the same behaviour. Just entering the folder takes like 7-10 seconds, and leaving it takes 4-5 seconds.

In more than 10 years I've only seen this happening now, in these folders containing 1TB+ and 200,000+ files.

[petermad]

2jesped

Still - does this happen if you use a fresh wincmd.ini file?

[jesped]

2jespedStill - does this happen if you use a fresh wincmd.ini file?

Yep.

It's all the same in Safe Mode and even deleting wincmd.ini and starting fresh.

[jesped]

So, resuming:

- It's not a Windows or disk problem because it works perfectly fine in Windows Explorer and all the other programs using those files (Topaz, Premiere, etc)

- It isn't some plugin issue because disabling them all doesn't help.

- It's not a Windows system or background running software or driver problem because it happens all the same in Safe Mode.

- It happens in different machines and reading the folder from the local network.

- It isn't a Total Commander misconfiguration because deleting wincmd.ini and starting fresh doesn't help either.

The only thing I can think of is Total Commander's core itself having some problem somehow handling folders with such a large number of files...

[ghisler(Author)]

What hardware do you have? I'm using an old core i5 first generation as my main development PC, and even with that it takes 5 seconds to enter a folder with 130000 subfolders, and 7 seconds to switch from full to brief view. However, I'm using an SSD now, which makes this much faster than with a harddisk.