Issues with high volume windows directories

[esimcox]

Hi Everyone, I've got kind of a generic question. I can provide more information as necessary - but has anyone seen shares on windows servers be difficult for macs to interact with? We have a process in our business that utilizes InDesign and EasyCatalog to import images into a catalog from a directory housed on a windows server. This folder has about 90,000 image files in it. We constantly see it give our mac clients issues with slowdowns and even freezing. They sometimes can't even copy 5 or so files into this directory successfully, or sometimes it will take upwards of 20+ minutes.

If anyone has seen this, how have you resolved it? Smaller sub-directories? anything i can turn off inside OSX in how it interacts with windows shares?

Thanks!

[thoule]

I'd suspect that it is trying to build a thumbnail preview icon for each image. That would kill things for you... http://osxdaily.com/2013/01/10/disable-finder-icon-thumbnails-previews-mac-os-x/
If the above link works, we can look into how to script that for your machine; to set it with Jamf.

[alexjdale]

I agree that it's likely an issue with the Mac trying to read and build metadata for all of the files. It's always been an issue.

[esimcox]

This seems to have helped a TON. I can now load this folder entirely within less than 30 seconds. I can test with users tomorrow while using indesign.

Could this have also affected transferring items to and from this folder? We are used to directly working from this server. Our catalog files live on this server (but on a different volume) and the images that populate the catalog live in this giant directory.

I forgot to mention we utilize ExtremeZ-IP for AFP protocol usage. Not sure whether this is still smart with advancements in SMB.

Thanks for your advice so far!! This is the most help i've gotten about this issue in the 3 years we've been battling it.