I collect…well, why mince words…naughty pictures. (That’s mincing words…)
(Windows 10, Pentium 2.7 GHz.)
I have a folder of favorites. Lots of 'em. This particular folder has 100 folders, and about 4,500 image files outside of those folders. (The sub-folders are actually kind of small, with only five or ten files each. The overall total folder size 6.7 Gb.) When I click to open the main folder, the little green progress bar takes 80 seconds to crawl before the file list displays.
Is this slowing down other performance on my pc? Is this slowing me down when I launch my browser, or when I open a spreadsheet?
The folder in question is set to be indexed; imagine how slow it would be without that!
Is there an optimum ratio of folders to subfolders to sub-subfolders to files? I Googled, but didn’t find anything really concrete, just advice on keeping things organized and recommendations for neatness.
The photos I collect aren’t porn, but they do account for more than 14GB, and my computer runs just fine.
When’s the last time you deleted your temporary internet files? I do a lot of tech support as part of my job and the vast majority of the time people complain to me that their computer is now running too slow, they answer that question with “what temporary internet files?”
No, they shouldn’t be slowing down anything other than browsing your file system.
I have 50 gigs of baseball players that I’ve been editing to display in Baseball Mogul & Out of the Park. Images of guys I’ve never edited before were all in one folder until the file display started bogging down, then I split 'em up by decade.
Grin! Okay, I know what they are. I’m always sad to have to delete them, because they keep some useful information. Just lazy stuff, like “Keep me logged on” to some of my fave sites.
Are PC tune-up appls, like AVG Tuneup or Zookaware, worth a darn? (Are there any free apps of this sort? Are they worth a darn?)
Indexing slows down ALL file displays, saving and retrieving, but only a tiny amount. You sacrifice quick savings to get quick finds.
Every file, every folder has a price. More of 'em, the slower things get.
Get a faster CPU and things speed up. Until you add more files and more folders.
Many things are cached. Open one folder, even with many files, and the data is cached for next time. Until the cache gets too big, then some data is shed. Rebooting causes most caches to be rebuilt, not always in the background.
Today’s file displays are not like your grandfather’s. In DOS days, if you asked for a directory, you got a directory, just a list of file names; reading a single directory is pretty fast. Today, depending on your settings, a directory might include thumbnails and other file data that takes time to read and compute, since the actual file may have to be retrieved in order to read internal data. Not a significant time for one file, but it can add up if you have a million files, especially video or images. The actual display of icons takes more time than text.
In short, there are many factors affecting speed. The trick is knowing which ones to tolerate and which ones to eliminate. Do some experimenting!
No, on a nice 450 Gb hard drive (the system drive.) This is why I wondered, in the first place, if I’ve made a mistake by jumbling too many files in one folder, just the way it would be with physical paper in a physical file folder. Categorizing is good in the physical world, and so I wondered if the same were true on a disk.
About 4,500 files? Piker. I’m sure I have over 10,000 picture files. They’re organized by alphabet into folders of 800-1,200 pictures apiece. Anything larger than that and I have trouble locating specific pictures or series. Good organization is the key to a useful collection. I don’t know how many videos I have, currently three folders, but it might be time to get those better organized. The video folders do take some seconds to load – some of them are huge files – but I don’t mind waiting. The anticipation is part of the thrill!
Hey, a guy’s gotta have a hobby!
Things aren’t actually stored “in folders” on your computer. Everything (or at least, everything on the same drive) is all just jumbled in to the same big pile. What a “folder” really is, is just a file consisting of a list of names and a numerical address for where the file by that name can be found on the disk. So a “folder with thousands of files in it” isn’t actually any more cumbersome for your computer than any other file with thousands of words in it (which isn’t a very large file at all).
Well, I did know that much…but I thought that the directory structure might have been inefficient in some way. My folder took 80 seconds to display, while mixdenny’s displays in two seconds.
But elfkin477 hit the bullseye! After running CCleaner, the folder in question popped open in…two seconds!
It won’t slow down accessing anything outside of that folder for sure. However, having so many files in the folder is definitely why it takes so long for Windows Explorer to display that directory.
This sounds like a fragmentation problem. The files in a given folder aren’t necessarily all near each other on your drive, so when you open that folder, you may be thrashing your hard drive trying to load stuff from lots of different places. Defragmenting should put files in the same directory near each other.
So, running a defrag might help.
Except… Windows 10 should automatically be regularly defragmenting things. So maybe it’s something else. It might be worth looking into your hard drive health and see if there are any errors in a logfile somewhere (sorry, I don’t know Windows enough to know what log to look in). Maybe your drive is starting to go, which makes it require lots of rereads to figure out what’s in that folder?
I would have thought so also…until I ran CCleaner, and the directory sped up.
(I have no clear idea what, exactly, CCleaner did, although I watched it trash a gigantic blortload of .dll files.)
I just ran the W10 defragmenting analysis, and it says my drive is 0% fragmented. (And I checked, and it is supposed to be defragmenting weekly.) But thank you for prompting me to check! I remember the good old days when you needed to defrag every so often!
Just to nitpick ('cause I used to write operating systems)…while you’re right about folder data, if the request is to amalgamate thousands of files located in diverse places, parse their data, and organize the result into a new table, the data size may indeed be a factor in the overall speed, especially in a highly-fragmented disk.
Although, personally, I think defragging is overrated. What used to be a simple text display of directory data 30 years ago is now a graphic-intensive display of metadata obtained from various sources, and the disk head movement’s restraining parameters have been replaced, at least partly, by CPU throughput efficiency.
I’ve used it for a long time. One note if you display thumbnail images in those folders. A default setting (Under Windows Explorer) is to clean up the Thumbnail Cache.
Cleaning that cache can be a small issue for me on a older and slower netbook (AMD C60 processor.) You have the hardware to power through that without a huge issue. It’s more an issue of the thumbnails being added a little more slowly after the folder displays than not being able to display the rest of the file data. If you do notice the behavior, and it bothers you at all, it’s as simple as adjusting the one checkbox.
DinoR: I’ll watch for that. I kinda like thumbnails, so won’t sacrifice 'em unless it is close to necessary…but it’s an option I didn’t know I had, so thank’ee kindly!
(You’ll laugh: I’ve been using Windows since version 3.1. And only last week, I learned you can launch an app by right-clicking and hitting “Open.” I’ve been double-clicking all this time, and didn’t even know that way existed!)