Bug: Very bad performance

[manake]

Description

Background

1. I spend like 2-4 hours daily in file explorers (work with 100,000+ assets, tagging, editing, reorganizing)
2. I didn't yet find a good file manager:

• Windows Explorer has the best performance but it lacks features like double-view, which are critial for me
• OneCommander doesn't work with 100k files, it just hangs, so it's unusable
• Adobe Bridge is very slow to open and work with, I abandoned it because it was too tiring
• Many other solutions only display PNG/JPG images but don't display PDFs for example or have very old UI that is too hard to operate

Files.community?

I found files.community 2 days ago and I really like that it's like Windows Explorer but with some critical features added (like multi-column view).

Problem

Sadly, the performance is currently terrible:

• lags (all the time)
• freezes for 20-30 seconds
• crashes every 2-3 minutes

Please see the video that will be attached in the second post.

Steps To Reproduce

1. Open and use it, no special steps.

Files Version

4.0.11.0

Windows Version

10.0.26100.6584

User ID

No response

Log File

N/A

[manake]

I'm using the best computer that is one the market with 64 GB ram and i7-13700 processor and all software generally works very fast (including Windows Explorer), so it's clearly a problem with this app only.

The folder node_modules that is being browsed on this video has merely 129 folders inside which should not be any problem whatsoever to display it with like 0.1 ms speed each time, but yet it takes between 2-30 seconds of lags on every action and not a single action completes in less than 2 seconds.

I'll buy it when it becomes production-ready, but that's not yet.

Untitled.mp4

[Josh65-2201]

Thanks for the feedback, please don't change the formatting of the template. For crashes please open a bug report specific to the crash, the log will have to be included.
For performance see https://files.community/docs/getting-started/faq#:~:text=How%20to%20Improve%20Performance and we're tracking this in the below linked issue. You can check there or click subscribe in the right sidebar for updates.

[manake]

I'm not sure why this is not a top 1 priority.

Don't you think that you should drop everything else and fix the most fundamental/core feature of file managers (which is: actually browsing files)?

How did this even happen that you coded some font options or whatever (non-essential things) while there are 20-30 second freezes on casual folder browsing?

Frankly, this all looks very weird because the ticket you linked to is from 2021, so it was like this for 4 years and no one thought that fixing performance is important?

[Josh65-2201]

Fixing performance is always important but it can't be done with one change or update, and stopping all development on Files for it doesn't make sense. As Files is open source there isn't a large development team and no one can be controlled on what they work on, only redirected if they asked. This is all done in their own time, not paid for.

If you look at the issue I linked (GitHub often hides these and you have to click show more around the middle), you will see many changes that contribute to performance have been made

[yaira2]

Thank you for sharing your thoughts. It's clear you want Files to succeed, and we truly appreciate your input.

Before diving in, I want to clarify that this isn't an excuse, it's an explanation of where things currently stand. Modern UI frameworks often come with trade offs, they can be slower, more prone to memory leaks, and require significant effort to optimize. We're also aware that parts of our own codebase need refinement, and we're actively working on that. It's also worth noting that Files started as a hobby project and has grown far quicker than we imagined 🙂

That said, long-time users can attest to how much more stable and responsive Files has become over the years. Regarding the issue you mentioned from 2021, we've posted multiple updates and even pinned the thread to our tracker so everyone can follow our progress transparently.

As the project owner, performance and stability remain my top priorities. At the same time, we encourage contributors to pursue features they're passionate about, which has led to a rich and diverse feature set. While we may not be the fastest file manager out there, we're committed to continuous improvement and we're certainly not slowing down.

[manake]

Yes, I can't wait to see a good file manager.

I've tried these:

• Windows Explorer
• Adobe Bridge
• macOS Finder
• ACDSee
• Total Commander
• WinSCP
• CyberDuck
• OneCommander
• And more...

And there just isn't anything that would work well.
Usual reasons:

• Bad performance
• Bad design (UI/UX)
• Lack of customization (e.g. compact mode in files.community and Adobe Bridge is much less compact than in Windows Explorer, it's a big deal to see say 70 items vertically instead of say 50)
• Lack of features (e.g. PDF/SVG/JPGXL preview, support for encrypted drives, no proper/informative dialogs on errors, connection to S3/FTP)
• Bugs

Some solutions that deliver stable 60-120 FPS on every action:

• VSCode (Electron: JS/HTML/CSS based)
• Unity (C#, C++)
• Using more native libs than high level, e.g. WebGL/WebGPU instead of pure HTML/CSS/JS, demo: https://alteredqualia.com/three/examples/webgl_cubes.html
• Without caching and building internal indexes/thumbnails it's unlikely to work smoothly

Sadly, the official solutions from Google/Microsoft/etc often don't deliver good performance and are themselves buggy:

• Android Jetpack Compose
• Microsoft-based UI libraries (C#)

I will definitely keep your project installed because it seems really promising in that you got many things right already. I can't wait for competition to Windows Explorer and Adobe Bridge to arrive and replace them and this has potential to do it and quite soon. I can't contribute to this project in terms of code but I can with $$$ once it's actually working.