XP Home Edition and large directories problems

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I'm a new XP Home user with a new Dell box in a LAN populated by Win98SE
machines. I'm astounded by how agonizingly slow XP is in reading large
directories over the LAN, and even in deleting large directories on the local
C: NTFS disk. By comparison, all my older Pentium I and Pentium II clunkers
are blindingly fast at dealing with *very* large file counts in shared
directories across the LAN.

What gives with XP???
 
draynes said:
I'm a new XP Home user with a new Dell box in a LAN populated by
Win98SE machines. I'm astounded by how agonizingly slow XP is in
reading large directories over the LAN, and even in deleting large
directories on the local C: NTFS disk. By comparison, all my older
Pentium I and Pentium II clunkers are blindingly fast at dealing
with *very* large file counts in shared directories across the LAN.

What gives with XP???
Click to expand...

No idea what you mean, actually.

I manage directories with hundreds of files, most in excess of 1GB each,
without any such troubles - although I will admit a command prompt
deletion/move/copy does *seem* faster in some ways.
 
The XP box takes a couple of minutes to read a shared directory on a 98SE box
over the LAN, before any file operations can even take place. I'm talking
about directories with 5K to 25K of files in them. Smaller file counts are
read in a lot faster. The size of the files I'm looking at is irrelevant,
it's the number of them. I also notice that XP is excruciatingly slow at
deleting large numbers of files in directories on the local NTFS hard drive.
 
The new Dell box is a P4-2.8 GHz, 1 gig ram, no antivirus or multimedia stuff
running in background. All the 98SE boxes are typically PI or PII's at
450-700 MHz. The LAN is all 10/100 megabit using a Linksys VPN firewall box
as a hub and cable modem gateway. Throughput on file copies and such is not
the problem. The problem is how slow XP reads shared directories over the
LAN when those directories contain from 1,000 to 25,000 files. Those
directories have to be read by XP before and after file copying or moving
operations, and XP just hangs for a few minutes at a time while it does that.
It doesn't matter if I use Explorer or some other file manager for these
operations. If I do the same large file copying and moving operations FROM a
98SE box TO the Dell XP box, sitting at one of the 98SE boxes, everything
goes much, much faster as 98SE doesn't have nearly as much internal overhead
to deal with in creating large directory metastructures in memory.

I've also noticed that deleting NTFS directories containing thousands of
files takes a long time. If I delete a directory containing 10,000 files I
have time to go have a smoke, or two, before the operation completes.

For now, I'm chalking this up to internal complexities in dealing with NTFS
file operations. Everything I've found so far in the Microsoft databases
basically says "yeah, XP does that, and there's not much you can do to help".
One suggestion was to get rid of all 8.3 file names, and don't have any
sequentially numbered files with common front ends. This is the most
ludicrous and impractical advice I've ever heard.

I've dealt with all types of older file systems on pc's and other types of
computers and have never seen anything like the overhead that XP has for
directory operations. OS/2 and Linux don't act this way, etc, etc.

I do not expect to find a system setting or tweak that will help.
 
draynes said:
I'm a new XP Home user with a new Dell box in a LAN populated by Win98SE
machines. I'm astounded by how agonizingly slow XP is in reading large
directories over the LAN, ....
Click to expand...


WinXP (or any other OS, for than matter) isn't reading the network
share directly. It's sending a request to the host computer, waiting
for the host computer to "inventory" the share in question, and then
return the results of that scan. Any slowness in this specific
situation can only be caused by a slow host computer, or a slow network.

....and even in deleting large directories on the local
C: NTFS disk. By comparison, all my older Pentium I and Pentium II clunkers
are blindingly fast at dealing with *very* large file counts in shared
directories across the LAN.

What gives with XP???
Click to expand...


For performance issues reading the local hard drive, look to
infrequently performed disk cleanups, a badly fragmented partition, too
many memory-resident processes or applications, or a hardware problem.



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Bruce Chambers

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