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Over a year ago I migrated to Windows 11 from Windows 10, and in that period I also went through a Windows Client update which introduced “Virtual File Support”.
I have a beefy machine, getting on the old side nonetheless (AMD Threadripper 2950X is performing very elegantly, 64GB ECC RAM, 2 NVME drives, 2 HDD drives, 1 SATA SSD drive.
Since that time, I have encountered freezing issues when using Windows File Explorer on certain folder types such as Downloads…
I have about 7 Nextcloud accounts being hosted across 3 Nextcloud Server instances located on my LAN.
For the past few months, I have been coping with those freeze issues but it has come to a point where this is no longer acceptable as it is detrimental to my workflow.
Based on my guts feeling (ie educated guess), I decided to disable “virtual File Support” to all but a handfull of accounts.
I am also using a few “Folder Sync Connection” spread across the various drive. This is part of my workflow as well.
At the end of the day, such setup seem to cause Windows 11 “File Explorer” related interaction to freeze for what seem an eternity.
Disabling “Virtual File Support” on most of my accounts has definitely shown greater response time from “File Explorer” and whatever program that needs to access folders.
For instance when Windows File Explorer freeze, I am getting the progress bar as well as the “Working on it…” message.
I have to wait a few seconds to half a minute or so to finally regain control on my system (I can switch between other apps on my system without issues, so it is not a hardware lock, but Windows is not allowing non blocking process in this particular case. Not all folders exhibit this issue, mostly Downloads and some system folders. It seems folder that Windows/Microsoft believe they must collect files details/data are affected that way (ie such as sortin of files types, date…
Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): Nextloud 24.0.5 (server side)
Nextcloud version (eg, 20.0.5): Nextloud 3.6.0 (Windows side)
Operating system and version (eg, Ubuntu 20.04): Windows 11
Apache or nginx version (eg, Apache 2.4.25): Apache 2.4 on server side.
PHP version (eg, 7.4): PHP 8.0 server side (was 7.4 until recently)
The issue you are facing:
File Explorer access under Windows 11 is suffering performance issues due to freeze lags in excess of 30 seconds or so when accessing certain folder type such as “Download” folder.
Is this the first time you’ve seen this error? (Y/N): No, this as been a consistent behavior for the past year or so.
Steps to replicate it:
- Link several accounts in Nextcloud Desktop application and have them coexist on several drives.
- Enable most if not all account and share folder connections across multiple (possibly one) drives.
- Run “Windows File Explorer” or any other application/software/program and request to open/save to those “Downloads” … folders
The output of your Nextcloud log in Admin > Logging:
none