Freezing / Unresponsive

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

I've had this problem for a long time now, and actually was on v24 until I just updated (forgot I had lifetime updates*) and the problem exists on both versions. There are at least two directories that I cannot access in XY, as every time I try it goes unresponsive and hangs, requiring me to end the process. There's nothing particularly special about them, and the really odd thing is that if I access them on other drives (I have multiple drives with the exact same contents as backups) it works just fine. So accessing D:\Desktop, for example, causes it to freeze, but D:\Documents and B:\Desktop works just fine. And obviously restarting the app and even rebooting the computer doesn't help, since as I mentioned, this has been an issue for a long time, at least several months.

*BTW, for those without lifetime updates, there really should be a repository of old versions, so they can access whatever version they paid for, as well as any updates they're entitled to for that version.

[phred]

*BTW, for those without lifetime updates, there really should be a repository of old versions, so they can access whatever version they paid for, as well as any updates they're entitled to for that version.

Searching the forum first is always a good thing.
https://www.xyplorer.com/freezer.php

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

*BTW, for those without lifetime updates, there really should be a repository of old versions, so they can access whatever version they paid for, as well as any updates they're entitled to for that version.

Searching the forum first is always a good thing.
https://www.xyplorer.com/freezer.php

Thanks, but I wasn't going to spend time searching for something that doesn't affect me. I mentioned that for those that don't have the lifetime license, and while it's great older downloads are available, those users shouldn't have to search the forum just to find them. They should be readily and clearly available on/from the downloads page.

[admin]

The link to previous versions can be found in the footer of each page of the website ("Previous versions").

Regarding your freezing problem: if the same physical location is only hanging under one logical name, there must be some settings associated with that name, maybe a tab setting, or some folder view settings. Something that is responsible for a lot of hard work, maybe some special columns. Only you can know. You might want to post a screenshot of where it freezes.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

Pretty sure I found the problem, though I have to say it was a bit of a pain. There are a few issues here, the problem itself and regarding troubleshooting this program.

I have a directory of videos with a little over 300 items (probably ~250 folders containing videos and the rest mostly videos). Any view that relies on thumbnails is so slow that XY goes unresponsive for several minutes while it loads. It does this even after it's created thumbs for the directory (at "High Speed" no less) if I use a different thumbnail size.

So there are a multitude of issues:

1. Thumbnail creation is far, far, far too slow/inefficient.
2. Thumbnails have to be created separately for every size instead of just creating one size and displaying them at different sizes.
3. It's not very clear what's going on and just looks like the program has frozen...
4. ...which it effectively has, which is its own issue, as it shouldn't become unresponsive during this process.
5. There's no way to cancel it and make the program respond again.
6. There's apparently no debugging process, requiring the user to dig into it to figure out the issue.
7. Finding the folder view setting to troubleshoot wasn't very easy, as I dug around in settings (Configuration), including searching for folder view, and looking around the toolbar until finally finding it. Even after I found it and played with it a few weeks ago, when I just went back today I again had a hard time finding it. All this to say, this was a lot more effort to find an issue that shouldn't even exist than I would have liked, and it would have been very helpful to have a log that I could have referenced and/or submitted to determine the issue.

Somewhat unrelated, but part of why I've been dealing with this for so long (and by that, I mean not using XY despite buying it a few years ago, and using several other file managers instead) and why it took so long to dig into it over this past month, is because as much as I like it, it didn't really seem worth the time to troubleshoot and try and figure out the issue when XY has a limited lifetime for me. I'm planning on switching to Linux once Windows 10 hits EOL, since I have zero intention of using 11, and since XY is Windows only, I didn't want to bother with it, especially since there's no telling how long before the issue will even be fixed. So I've been looking into other file managers that I can continue using once I make the switch. I'm guessing it would be too much work and would likely require rewriting it in a different language, but any chance of making it cross-platform? I suspect many others are planning on moving away from Windows over the coming years, and it would be nice to have this as an option there.

[admin]

1) If XY is taking a long time, it's because it's working on something or waiting for Windows to come back. It would take more information about your configuration to find out why these video folders are taking longer than expected.

2) ESC cancels thumbnail creation.

3) No plans to go cross-platform.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

Yes, it's working on something: generating the thumbnails. I'm just not sure why it takes so long and why it can't remain responsive while it does it. As far as additional info, you didn't specify what specific info would be useful, so here:

Win10 Version 22H2 (OS Build 19045.4894)
i7-7820X
64GB RAM
GTX 1070 (previously 770, no apparent change)
Seagate IronWolf 8TB (same issue with two identical drives, and don't have any other issues, so not the drive)
XYplorer 26.50.0100 (as mentioned, had the issue with v24 and nothing changed after updating)

And since I realized after typing that that you probably meant XY's config, I've attached that. There really should be a function to create this and automatically remove certain content (mainly paths), as it took me several minutes to go through and do that manually.

I tested and Escape does work; however, given it's not clear what's going on (for the longest time I thought it was actually freezing, whereas it was just unresponsive for *several minutes*, and even once I figured that out it wasn't very obvious why) and since it just says "created thumb x/y: ..." and nothing along the lines of "Press [Esc] to cancel" even if I knew what the issue was I wouldn't know how to "fix" it.

Let me know if you need more info. For now perhaps I'll try just setting it to details view for that folder and see if I can finally actually use XY, though it is disappointing I won't get much use out of it due to being limited to Windows.

[admin]

Thanks, I looked at your INI file. Nothing suspicious. It's just that extracting the video thumbnails takes time. XY is waiting for the thumbnail handler to return, and it's waiting in a foreground thread, that's how the architecture looks at the moment.

What you can do:
1) Use thumbnail caching.
2) XY allows infinite parallel instances, so if you need to create a lot of video thumbnails, just do it in a second instance and keep working in the first instance.

What I did:
Added "(ESC to Stop)" to those status bar messages.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

It just seems like there must be a way to improve the speed of thumbnail creation so this problem doesn't occur. It also seems like something that should occur in a background thread. Also, I have thumbnail caching enabled, to an SSD no less. Is it looking at all files in all directories to create the thumbnails? Maybe that's why it's taking so long?

[admin]

Video thumbnails are usually slower than image thumbnails because it's more work for the handler to open the video and create a thumbnail.
Only files that can possibly have a thumbnail are looked at, and only in the listed directory.
If you have thumbnail caching enabled, the work is done. The next listing will be super fast.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

Unfortunately, none of that seems to be my experience:

Only files that can possibly have a thumbnail are looked at, and only in the listed directory.

When it's building the thumbs, it says "created thumb x/y: ..." where y equals the total number of items, files and directories. And some, though oddly not all, folders have thumbnails for one of the videos within. So it's definitely creating them for items not in the listed directory.

If you have thumbnail caching enabled, the work is done. The next listing will be super fast.

This also doesn't seem to really be the case. Even after it created all the thumbs, I went back a couple days later and it still had to (re)create some. While it's possible this was due to some changes to the directories/files, they were minimal and really shouldn't have required much, yet it still took a while (I don't recall exactly, but I think it was at least 15-20 seconds for something like 6 thumbs). And even after that, it still almost always goes unresponsive for anywhere from a few to several seconds after changing views. But then, it also almost always is unresponsive for a few to several seconds, sometimes 15-20+, just in normal usage. For example, I would scroll up/down, maybe open a file, switch out of XY for anywhere from a few seconds to several minutes, and when I came back and tried to scroll or click a file, it wouldn't do anything for a while, then suddenly it would respond to my inputs. I thought at first it was an issue of putting it in the background then bringing it back to the foreground, but with more testing I've found that's not even required. I open a new tab and it's unresponsive for a bit. I change directories and it's unresponsive for a bit. I even just scroll and/or click a file then do it again, and it takes some times to start responding again. It's bad enough I don't even want to bother doing further testing, because it's so aggravating having it constantly go unresponsive and having to wait for it. It does it not 100% of the time, but fairly constantly, to the point it happened several times in just a couple minutes of messing with it. Just now, I was testing again, and I switched the directory to large tiles and started scrolling by grabbing the scrollbar and dragging it, and about halfway down it "stuck" and stopped scrolling for a couple seconds, then jumped to where the mouse was (I had kept moving it when it stopped scrolling). I then dragged it back up and it took a few seconds before it did anything, at which point it jumped up. And it does this all the time. And by the way, I've used several different file managers, and none have exhibited these issues.

Also, unrelated but exacerbated by this unresponsiveness, the fact XY scrolls down as much as it does when clicking on a file that's only partly showing at the bottom of the window is problematic. Instead of scrolling down just enough to fully show the file, which I would expect, it scrolls enough so the file is fully shown AND so that the file at the top, which would now be partly showing, is pushed off so the next file at the top is lined up exactly at the top. In other words, if it's listed with files A,B,C,D,E,F and A-E are fully visible and F is partly cut off, and F is clicked on, I would expect it to scroll down just enough so that A would be partly cut off and F is fully visible. Instead, since XY apparently doesn't like to show the file at the top being partly cut off, it pushes A completely out of view and scrolls down enough so that B is now lined up with the top of the window. This has the effect of moving F up much farther than expected. The problem with this is that when double-clicking F, it jumps up so far that now the spot that was double-clicked isn't over F anymore, but over G, which was previously entirely out of view. This would be bad enough, but with all the delays of XY being unresponsive, this leads to *several seconds* of not knowing which file, F or G, is being opened.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

To add to the last post, I just hit the minimize button on XY and it took a second to even respond to that, so it seems to be an issue with the program as a whole vs just the loading/responding of the panes and their contents. I should also mention it was being very laggy a few days ago and I restarted it and it immediately got better, so maybe there's a memory leak or something. I'm trying that again to see what happens.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

I take the lack of further response to indicate a lack of interest in this issue, which is disappointing, because XY could be a great file manager, but its constant freezing is making it unusable. I've been using it extensively the past 3 months and when it works well, it's amazing, but all too often it doesn't work well. I'm having constant issues with it either being unresponsive, slow, or not working right. On a daily basis, multiple times a day, it right-clicking items will not show the context menu, often for several seconds to a minute or more at a time, to the point I'm frequently having to just do something else and come back, causing constant interruptions in my workflow. Then, when the context menu does show, sometimes it stays showing even when I click off of it, making me have to click something on it just to get it to go away. Another frequent issue is that switching between tabs will often cause it to freeze, again for anywhere from a few seconds to half a minute or more. And when it happens, it will happen EVERY SINGLE TIME I switch back and forth. Restarting it usually seems to help, but only for a short time, and I shouldn't have to restart an app multiple times a day just to get it to work. I also recently had an issue where it was unresponsive due to creating thumbnails since, despite my feedback before, apparently it's considered acceptable for this to be such a performance hit (at least a minute of waiting for it to create a dozen or so thumbnails, for example). And despite hitting escape to stop it, it just kept going right back to it, over and over, until the third or fourth time when it finally stopped, only to start again when I tried to do something else (don't remember exactly). It's to the point I have to select a tab or perform whatever action I want, then switch to doing something else and check it again after a while to see if it's responding again, then do something else, then switch out again, and repeat. Even after it sat for a few minutes as I was typing this, I just tried to switch to it and it wouldn't even come up because it was unresponsive, so I switched back to type some more then tried switching to it again, this time having it come up. Multiple times I'll try to click into it and it won't respond, then it will just minimize. I could go on, but I don't feel it's worth it. I love this program when it's working (though there are certain other things about its design that I'm not fond of, which I would post about, but I don't feel it would be worth my time), but at this point I regret buying it. It's extremely slow and completely unstable. So now I need to look for something else and just write this off as a failed experiment and a waste of money.

[WindowsExplorerSucks]

Also, just going to throw this here as a perfect example of how buggy this app is:

[RalphM]

The lack of responses might be caused by TLDR fatigue and your expressed attitude in "how buggy this app is"