Re: [Netatalk-admins] Performance issues in OS X Finder, 10.8 and 10.9

[Chris F. <cf...@fe...>]

Hi Ralph,

>> Thanks for your help.
> 
> Sorry, looks like I'm of no big help here. :/

On the contrary, your comments are very valuable, and it looks like your Dtrace script led me straight to one major issue I need to investigate.

> one way or another, the Finder sucks! Its probably checking tags all through the hierarchy here. Iirc against an OS X AFP server these AFP function calls looking for xattrs are not used, instead the Finder uses Spotlight RPC function calls tunelled through the AFP connection. This might explain why we see a corner case here not catched by Apple engineers when working on the Finder.
> 
> I've been porting the Netatalk Spotlight code to Samba and made substantial enhancements while I was at it. "Backporting" these changes to Netatalk will further improve Netatalk's Spotlight support. I'll get to that in the coming weeks, one the the next Netatalk updates should ship the improvements.

Note that I have not enabled Spotlight support in netatalk. Do you think that would help, i. e., if I compile netatalk 3.1.3 with Spotlight support, should I expect the Finder to use the Spotlight RPC calls you mention, or will your further work on Spotlight be a prerequisite for that to happen?

It looks like it will take considerable effort to get Gnome Tracker to compile on SmartOS, which is why I haven't enabled Spotlight yet.

If anybody has any tips on how to do that, I'd be very grateful.

A final note, the slowdown issues we are battling apply not only to the Finder, but also the Open dialog within applications. Double whammy. I assume the Open dialog and the Finder run much of the same code...

Thanks,
Chris