Catalog faster – ExFAT, FAT32, NTFS, and SMB server volumes

[neo-admin]

The ever increasing amount of data makes it important to catalog it as fast as possible.

We carefully profile each version of NeoFinder and try to find all possibilities to gain as much speed as we can.
During such a profiling session, we noticed that macOS is really very slow when accessing "extended attribute" data on certain file systems. The ExFAT drives in macOS, for example, is really extraordinarily slow, but the NTFS and FAT32 drivers are also not very optimized, unfortunately. Unfortunately, the latest version of macOS also have rather slow SMB server clients, too.

These extended attributes are used, among other things, to store Finder Comments, Finder Tags, and somehwat historic information, such as the resource fork, the FileType/Creator, and more older file system data, like yet another old "file is invisible" flag from the "Classic" Mac OS days.

NeoFinder tries to read as much of that data as possible for cataloging.
But if you don't use any older files, and you can really ignore that older extra data, there is now a new Expert Setting to speed things up.

https://www.cdfinder.de/guide/24/neofin ... prefs.html

The setting is called "Catalog old FileType/Creator data", and is turned ON by default.

If you use volumes in ExFAT, NTFS, FAT32 formats, you can turn this OFF and see a very good speed improvement.

Make sure to also turn OFF the regular options to catalog Finder Comments and Finder Tags, if you can, and cataloging will get even faster.