alt Hacker NewsI think a lot of people have a hard time differentiating the underlying systems from what they _see_ and use it to bash MS products.
I heard that it was perhaps recently fixed, but copying many small files was multiple times faster to do via something like Total Commander vs the built in File Explorer (large files goes equally fast).
People seeing how slow Explorer was to copy would probably presume that it was a lower level Windows issue if they had a predisposed bias against Microsoft/Windows.
My theory about Explorers sluggishness is that they added visual feedback to the copying process at some point, and for whatever reason that visual feedback is synchronous/slow (perhaps capped at the framerate, thus 60 files a second), whilst TC does updating in the background and just renderers status periodically whilst the copying thread(s) can run at full speed of what the OS is capable of under the hood.
Replies
> to bash MS products.
Microsoft gives them a lot of ammo. While, as I said, Microsoft et al. have seen that SMB is indeed efficient, at the same time security has been neglected to the point of being farcical. You can see this in headlines as recent as last week: Microsoft is only now, in 2025, deprecating RC4 authentication, and this includes SMB.
So while one might leverage SMB for high throughput file service, it has always been the case that you can't take any exposure for granted: if it's not locked down by network policies and you don't regularly ensure all the knobs and switches are tweaked just so, it's an open wound, vulnerable to anything that can touch an endpoint or sniff a packet.
A problem with Explorer, that it also shares with macOS Finder[1], is that they are very much legacy applications with features piled on top, and Explorer was never expected to be used for heavy I/O work and tends to do things the slower way possible, including doing things in ways that are optimized for "random first time user of windows 95 who will have maybe 50 files in a folder"
[1] Finder has parts that show continued use of code written for MacOS 9 :V
I dunno about Windows Explorer, but macOS’ finder seems to hash completed transfers over SMB (this must be something it can trigger the receiver to do in SMB itself, it doesn’t seem slow enough for the sender to be doing it on a remote file) and remove transferred files that don’t pass the check.
I could see that or other safety checks making one program slower than another that doesn’t bother. Or that sort of thing being an opportunity for a poor implementation that slows everything down a bunch.