IrfanView: sometimes very slow loading

This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

On 07/09/2015 14:00, Terry Pinnell wrote:
This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

Likely cause - reading all the files in the directory.

Possible fix - upgrade to a faster HD or faster OS.

Can you try an SATA attached HD? Perhaps get an SATA card if your HD is
still the old 80-pin connector.

Win-10 does a lot of caching, providing it has enough memory. Suggest
an 8 GB or 16 GB RAM PC for maximum benefit.

XP is well past its sell-by date now.

--
Cheers,
David
Web: http://www.satsignal.eu

David Taylor wrote:

On 07/09/2015 14:00, Terry Pinnell wrote:
This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

Likely cause - reading all the files in the directory.

But that would occur whenever I opened a file in a new folder and
would vary with size of the folder, and neither is the case.

Nor does it explain the WD activity.

--
Terry, East Grinstead, UK

On 07/09/2015 15:30, Terry Pinnell wrote:
David Taylor wrote:
[]
Likely cause - reading all the files in the directory.

But that would occur whenever I opened a file in a new folder and
would vary with size of the folder, and neither is the case.

Nor does it explain the WD activity.

Windows will cache access to recently used directories, up to a certain
size (depending on the available memory space). It's also possible that
adjacent or next-in-line directories will be cached, although that's
more likely to be a function of the program accessing the directories
than of Windows itself. Later Windows versions (perhaps than XP) also
try to read much bigger blocks from the disk than the program requests -
512 KB rings a bell although I would need to look up the details.

If the hard disk access happens only of the first read of that
directory, caching seems the most likely explanation.

If there are too many files in a directory, that can significantly slow
things down - something like 10,000 files is too many.

Is the disk FAT32 or NTFS?

There's another issue - if your hard disk is fragmented the reads may
need to come from significantly different portions of the disk, and may
thus take longer while the read/write head moves. Not once cached, of
course. Even worse if the directory file itself is fragmented. That's
why it's worth doing a full defrag once in a while. IObit's SmartDefrag
calls it "Defrag and prioritise files", other programs will have
different names for the function.

--
Cheers,
David
Web: http://www.satsignal.eu

On Mon, 07 Sep 2015 14:00:26 +0100, Terry Pinnell
wrote:

This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

You're likely catching your computer when it's doing something else,
and you had to wait for it to finish. That external drive was probably
active before you clicked on the photo - just a coincidence.

File indexing was always one of the big culprits with XP, but there's
many other thing it could be doing.

In article , David Taylor
wrote:

This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

Likely cause - reading all the files in the directory.

doubtful, but if so, that's an incredibly bad design. there is no
reason to scan the file system on every launch and certainly not after
a brief gap.

what's more likely is that the drive spun down and has to spin back up,
which is why the activity light blinks.

Possible fix - upgrade to a faster HD or faster OS.
Can you try an SATA attached HD? Perhaps get an SATA card if your HD is
still the old 80-pin connector.

that won't matter if the drive spun down.

if the problem is something else, it won't make much of a difference
either because if the computer is old enough to not have sata at all,
then it's too slow to benefit much from adding it.

Win-10 does a lot of caching, providing it has enough memory. Suggest
an 8 GB or 16 GB RAM PC for maximum benefit.

any app that relies on the operating system to cache files or uses the
file system directly is fundamentally broken.

XP is well past its sell-by date now.

yep, as is the hardware on which it's running.

In article , David Taylor
wrote:

There's another issue - if your hard disk is fragmented the reads may
need to come from significantly different portions of the disk, and may
thus take longer while the read/write head moves. Not once cached, of
course.

fragmentation does not make a difference anymore and hasn't for years.

Even worse if the directory file itself is fragmented.

that is not the same as disk fragmentation, but it can sometimes make a
difference.

That's
why it's worth doing a full defrag once in a while. IObit's SmartDefrag
calls it "Defrag and prioritise files", other programs will have
different names for the function.

a full defragment is a complete waste of time and puts the contents of
the entire drive at risk (and adds additional wear and tear too).

if the directory is fragmented, then only that needs to be defragmented.

Terry Pinnell wrote:

This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

External HDDs do go to sleep. When is up to their firmware. For me,
the "green" USB-attached HDDs go to sleep too often and are too long to
wake. We had a Toshiba USB 1GB HDD that would prevent us from using
Acronis True Image (or Macrium Reflect or Easeus ToDo Backup so probably
all imaging backup programs). The backup would start okay but then hang
after an hour, or more. The backup program would wait for a write
operation to complete (they go in bunches), the external HDD would not
respond for a too long time, and the backup would hang waiting. We
could kill the backup and the USB HDD was usable but I could tell in
Explorer that I would occasionally catch it napping and it was slow to
start responding. And it napped too frequently.

I checked the power options did not spin down the drives. That didn't
help. The "green" feature of the drive's firmware would still make the
USB-attached HDD spin down too often and too long. Replacing the HDD
with a WD blue or black HDD solved the problem. Since it was a Toshiba
USB drive, it was probably a green Toshiba HDD (not a WD drive). WD has
their green drives, too, so I wouldn't bother using those. The green
drives are designed in their firmware to spin down often to reduce heat.
Most external cases have no active cooling (fan) and inadequate
ventilation, if any, or case mass and fins as a heatsink for passive
convection cooling. Green drives are also considered mobile drives so
spinning down often (and not coming up quick to avoid sporadic startups
when the drive itself was not actually addressed) saved power. The WD
blues don't spin as fast (5400 RPM) so not as responsive a drive but
under typical user deployment won't be noticed to be slower than the
hotter higher RPM (7200 RPM) WD black drives.

To get away from the too short idle spin down and too long spin up time
of green drives, and because you cannot alter their firmware, I get rid
of green drives. With a good enclosure, I don't have to be worried
about heat. In my setups, I'm not trying to squeeze every milliamp out
of a battery, especially since all but one of my USB-attached drives are
not USB powered or they could be USB powered but I keep them on an A/C
power source. I want continual and immediate access to the USB drives,
not sputtered access which can affect long-running programs that have
repeated but not necessarily constant writing.

You could check your power options to make sure drive spin-down is not
enabled. Set "turn off hard disk" to zero and check "USB selective
suspend" is disabled. You could edit the properties of the device to
disable "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" but
that's if you want other drives to spin down by having the option
enabled in your currently selected power options theme. However, that
will not affect the power saving algorithms in the drive's firmware. I
recall reading that some drives can use their own utility to change the
idle period for when they go to sleep. Not sure how that would help in
a mixed drive environment where some USB drives don't use that brand of
drive inside.

If you are trying to use USB power for the external HDD, you may have to
use 2 USB ports to get sufficient power rather than using just one port.
Drives wanting more power (during surge) than the USB port can handle
/should/ come with a Y-adapter USB cable. Not having a sufficient power
source could mean the drive takes too long to wake up and spin up.
Instead of using USB power, and if the external case allows an A/C power
source then go with the A/C adapter. If you are using a USB hub to
connect multiple USB drives, make sure it is a powered USB hub. A
passive one would be trying to distribute the power from a single USB
port to all drives connected to the passive hub.

If it is not a power issue to the external drive, about the only
solution I've heard of (other than replacing the HDD with a better one)
to get around the drive's firmware for its power saving mode is to use a
keep-alive utility. It repeatedly polls the drive or writes a dummy
file on the USB-attached HDD to keep it from sleeping (e.g.,
http://keepalivehd.codeplex.com/ or http://nosleephd.codeplex.com/).
Another solution would be to write a batch (.bat) file that writes a bit
of text to a file on the drive, like "echo hello d:\file.txt", and use
Task Scheduler to run the .bat file at periods shorter than the drive's
firmware idle period for when it activates its sleep mode. The in the
command overwrites the same file each time so the file will not grow.

In article , VanguardLH
wrote:

External HDDs do go to sleep. When is up to their firmware.

and the operating system.

For me,
the "green" USB-attached HDDs go to sleep too often and are too long to
wake. We had a Toshiba USB 1GB HDD that would prevent us from using
Acronis True Image (or Macrium Reflect or Easeus ToDo Backup so probably
all imaging backup programs). The backup would start okay but then hang
after an hour, or more. The backup program would wait for a write
operation to complete (they go in bunches), the external HDD would not
respond for a too long time, and the backup would hang waiting. We
could kill the backup and the USB HDD was usable but I could tell in
Explorer that I would occasionally catch it napping and it was slow to
start responding. And it napped too frequently.

your backup app is very broken.

there is *no* reason why a sleeping hard drive should cause *any* app
to fail, other than it's a buggy piece of ****.

I checked the power options did not spin down the drives. That didn't
help. The "green" feature of the drive's firmware would still make the
USB-attached HDD spin down too often and too long.

so what?

spinning down when not in use is a good thing for consumer pcs and many
nas drives which aren't used 24/7 non-stop.

why would anyone want the drive to be spinning while they sleep or are
away from the computer?? it makes no sense.

Replacing the HDD
with a WD blue or black HDD solved the problem.

there was no problem to solve.

spindown is a *feature* and a good one at that because it reduces wear
and tear on the drive when it's not being used.

Since it was a Toshiba
USB drive, it was probably a green Toshiba HDD (not a WD drive). WD has
their green drives, too, so I wouldn't bother using those. The green
drives are designed in their firmware to spin down often to reduce heat.
Most external cases have no active cooling (fan) and inadequate
ventilation, if any, or case mass and fins as a heatsink for passive
convection cooling.

as you say, spinning down reduces heat, which would be what you want if
the external case is poorly ventilated.

not that heat makes that much of a difference but some people want
their drives cooler for no particular reason.

Green drives are also considered mobile drives so
spinning down often (and not coming up quick to avoid sporadic startups
when the drive itself was not actually addressed) saved power. The WD
blues don't spin as fast (5400 RPM) so not as responsive a drive but
under typical user deployment won't be noticed to be slower than the
hotter higher RPM (7200 RPM) WD black drives.

if the operating system queried the drive, then it *must* spin up. the
drive has no way to know why.

To get away from the too short idle spin down and too long spin up time
of green drives, and because you cannot alter their firmware, I get rid
of green drives.

actually, you can change the timeout in the firmware of many drives,
but that's not a good idea unless it's in a server or raid, in which
case, you bought the wrong drive.

With a good enclosure, I don't have to be worried
about heat.

there's no need to worry about heat in normal use.

In my setups, I'm not trying to squeeze every milliamp out
of a battery, especially since all but one of my USB-attached drives are
not USB powered or they could be USB powered but I keep them on an A/C
power source. I want continual and immediate access to the USB drives,

if you cared about continual access, you wouldn't be using usb.

not sputtered access which can affect long-running programs that have
repeated but not necessarily constant writing.

nonsense. there is *no* effect on any app, other than a brief delay to
spin up the idling hard drive.

any app that fails due to an idling hard drive is *broken*.

You could check your power options to make sure drive spin-down is not
enabled. Set "turn off hard disk" to zero and check "USB selective
suspend" is disabled. You could edit the properties of the device to
disable "Allow the computer to turn off this device to save power" but
that's if you want other drives to spin down by having the option
enabled in your currently selected power options theme. However, that
will not affect the power saving algorithms in the drive's firmware. I
recall reading that some drives can use their own utility to change the
idle period for when they go to sleep. Not sure how that would help in
a mixed drive environment where some USB drives don't use that brand of
drive inside.

why bother.

If you are trying to use USB power for the external HDD, you may have to
use 2 USB ports to get sufficient power rather than using just one port.
Drives wanting more power (during surge) than the USB port can handle
/should/ come with a Y-adapter USB cable.

nonsense.

just about all computers these days can source enough current on usb 2
and certainly on usb 3.

Not having a sufficient power
source could mean the drive takes too long to wake up and spin up.

nope. not having sufficient power means the drive won't spin up at all.

Instead of using USB power, and if the external case allows an A/C power
source then go with the A/C adapter. If you are using a USB hub to
connect multiple USB drives, make sure it is a powered USB hub. A
passive one would be trying to distribute the power from a single USB
port to all drives connected to the passive hub.

there is no such thing as a passive usb hub.

*all* usb hubs are powered, either self-powered or bus-powered.

If it is not a power issue to the external drive, about the only
solution I've heard of (other than replacing the HDD with a better one)

it's not a question of better or worse. it's an intentional design
decision.

unless a drive is being used in a raid or high use server, you *want*
the drive to spin down because it reduces wear and tear on the drive.

to get around the drive's firmware for its power saving mode is to use a
keep-alive utility. It repeatedly polls the drive or writes a dummy
file on the USB-attached HDD to keep it from sleeping (e.g.,
http://keepalivehd.codeplex.com/ or http://nosleephd.codeplex.com/).
Another solution would be to write a batch (.bat) file that writes a bit
of text to a file on the drive, like "echo hello d:\file.txt", and use
Task Scheduler to run the .bat file at periods shorter than the drive's
firmware idle period for when it activates its sleep mode. The in the
command overwrites the same file each time so the file will not grow.

that's incredibly stupid.

On Mon, 07 Sep 2015 14:00:26 +0100, Terry Pinnell wrote:

This occurs usually at the start of a session or after a long gap. I
double-click a JPG in Explorer and instead of loading with the usual
speed that's one of IrfanView's impressive features, it takes 10-15
secs. During this time the LED flashes on one of my external WD hard
drives.

After that, for subsequent JPGs, it's back to normal - until hours
later when it happens again. It's as if the WD unit goes to sleep and
IV has to wake it up for some reason - even though the JPG is not on
that drive.

I'm using the latest version, 4.4.0 (32 bit) on an XP PC.

Anyone seen anything similar or have any insight into the likely cause
- and a suggested possible fix please?

Run chkdsk.

Sent from my iFurryUnderbelly.

--
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