For the past year or so I have had a computer grabbing a webcam image from a construction cam at my alma mater. At first it was grabbing photos every 15 minutes but after a time I switched to every five minutes instead. As you can imagine, this creates a whole lot of files over the course of time. I recently decided to go back and start working with these images so I can create a time lapse of the event this far.
Long story short: I had a folder on my FreeNAS box which had 25000+ image files in it. I connected to the computer from my iMac via the SMB protocol. The window loaded and loaded but never showed me the files inside. (I actually forgot about it and came back several hours later to discover that the folder did load, but it was unusable because it wanted to reload after I made a change. I actually watched it sit there fore 35 minutes without making any visible progress.)
I logged onto the FreeNAS web interface and opened the file manager. After letting the page load for about 10 minutes it finally was giving me a list of files, but it was growing constantly and was basically unusable.
Even trying to copy the folder to my local machine resulted in a copying bar which stayed open for hours without doing anything.
Highly discouraged, I realized that I had not tried to access the folder from my Windows 7 machine. I opened up the network storage and instantly saw I file list of files. I could move the files around and all it took was a short time to reload the folder once finished.
As I fell asleep later that night it dawned on me, I was connecting via SMB, but my FreeNAS box is also configured to allow for AFP connections. So I tried connecting via AFP and I was instantly given a list of files which could be moved, opened, copied or deleted.
I’m not sure what this is telling me, but I think it’s worth sharing.