Windows 10 explorer suddenly very slow, uninstallling tsvn fixes, reinstalling breaks again

[Luc Van der Veken]

Since the beginning of this week, my Windows 10 explorer has suddenly become extremely slow in some actions, with no visible effect on others.

Navigating through different folders is a snap, but bringing up a context menu takes forever, and opening a file sometimes sits in between (but far from always, 90% of the time there's no visible delay).

Because I first assumed they would be responsible (again), I sent a screen capture video to our IT department where you can see it take 49 seconds between a right click on a file and the moment the context menu pops up. That was a file on a network share where no svn repositories are located anywhere nearby.

(the screen video shows nothing really relevant to Tortoise, so I'm not including it here.)

Once the menu appears, explorer behaves approximately normal until you close its window. Open a new one, and the problem comes back.

The effect is less severe on local disks, but the symptoms exist there too. 

As the week went by, I managed to gradually pinpoint the problem to "something to do with icons", discovered that resetting the icon cache made no difference, and in the end I discovered just now that the problem completely goes away when I uninstall TortoiseSVN, and comes back after the first reboot when I reinstall it.

Now I didn't update or upgrade Tortoise recently, so I think some Windows 10 update that came in over the weekend or early on Monday, or something like that, must also be involved.

Anyone else with this problem?

[André Ziegler]

last week was patchday, so Microsoft released new updates.

Disable overlay icons in TSVN options.

[Luc Van der Veken]

Thanks for the suggestion to disable overlay icons, but I already tried that, and it doesn't help (it's off now, by unchecking all drive types, I assume that's what you meant - I dind't do a full reboot yet though, just logged off and back on, that's normally enough to restart all explorer plug-ins).

Before that I also tried changing the status cache from 'default' to 'shell', made no difference.

Last week was patch Tuesday, but the problem started before that, last Monday.
But when I sort my installed app history by date, I see that I *did* receive a long list of updates camouflaged as new installations, all installed on 9 april, the day that the problems began.

The list includes just about the entire set of Windows 10 built-in apps (calculator, camera, groove music, maps, people, onedrive, paint 3d, ...). 14 of them on the 9th, plus some more on the 6th, the 4th and the 3rd.

I tried uninstalling OneDrive, it won't even let me. It disappears from the installed apps list, but remains installed and active.

So one or more of these must conflict with Tortoise now. My bet is on OneDrive, because it uses overlay icons too.

[Luc Van der Veken]

On Tuesday, April 17, 2018 at 12:10:41 PM UTC+2, I wrote:

Thanks for the suggestion to disable overlay icons, but I already tried that, and it doesn't help (it's off now, by unchecking all drive types, I assume that's what you meant - I didnd't do a full reboot yet though, just logged off and back on, that's normally enough to restart all explorer plug-ins).

Well, a full reboot after disabling overlays (instead of just logging off and back on) DID fix it.

But of course, that means I don't have the overlay icons anymore, which was the primary reason why I used Tortoise :(

It means I'm on the lookout for an alternative, something like SourceTree is for git. Pardon my language.

[Luc Van der Veken]

On Wednesday, April 18, 2018 at 9:59:53 AM UTC+2, Luc Van der Veken wrote:

Well, a full reboot after disabling overlays (instead of just logging off and back on) DID fix it.

A good thing that I decided not to give up yet.

Having noticed someone mentioning it related to slow performance in another thread, I did the 'Clean up' action on all my working copies.

Re-enabled icons, turned status cache back to Default, rebooted, and the problem did not come back (yet).

I've uninstalled and reinstalled Tortoise at least three times last week with no effect, but never did anything about the existing checkouts. I should have though about something this simple.

[michael.o...@gmail.com]

Prologue

In the last few decades, I stumbled over quite some reasons that made Windows unusably slow. Far behind virus scanner and Windows update, but still a problem around 2008, TortoiseSVN had to be fixed to only show icon overlays on exactly those directories where there workdirs can exist.

New old problem - Fast foward by a decade.

1) Some time ago, I noticed the appearance of unexpected delays with accesses to permanent storage, e.g. when just browsing in folders with Windows explorer. But a lot of changes to the system had occurred. 2) This week, storage access became extremely slow; e.g. showing the (next-level) contents of a small folder (without SVN data) on (HDD) D: after 8.5 s (1000 times the random block access time of the drive). So I had to solve this, and I remembered previous TSVN problems.
My guesses are now:
1) This was caused by installation of TSVN 10.1 and the checkout of a tiny repository on C:.
2) I loaded a rather big repository onto D:

TSVN on this PC was first configured to work (exactly) on fixed drives (here C: and D:) and on ("included") C:\local\data\svn and D:\local\data\svn, with default caching. For analysis, I deactivated fixed drives, because the documentation tells that the includes still will be covered. This did not help with response times, even after reboot. Uninstalling TSVN made the performance problems go away. I installed TSVN 1.10.1 again, but now not a single overlay was shown. I installed TSVN 1.11.1 (x64) as an upgrade (with reboot), still no overlays in sight. Perhaps a permission problem or failed UAC check? Opening the context menu shows the SVN entries (that only appear for SVN workdirs), so from that side, TSVN identifies the subdirs approprietly. I noticed the tsvncache.exe was not started.

So my bug report became a different one (or two reports), but the performance problems may affect other people and deserve to be documented.

My setup:
W7 x64
C: including operating system on internal SSD (with Veracrypt "system encryption")
D: on internal HDD (Veracrypt partition encryption, thus mounted manually after logging in)
occasionally connected USB storage, mostly on mountpoints in c:\local\mnt
32 GB RAM, so Windows should be able to cache everything relevant here. "should"
All changes were done under the same local Windows account.
Some other TSVN versions had been installed on this PC for troubleshooting a different bug.

Best regards
M.O.

[julian...@gmail.com]

Here is what works around this at the cost of the context menu:

Download https://www.nirsoft.net/utils/shexview.html
Start ShellExView
Look for the TortoiseSVN Context Menu extension
Right click and select „Disable Selected Items“
Two handlers will also be disabled automatically

You might need to restart. I think I did not but I might have restarted the Explorer.

Since I have done this the context menu opening lags (took close to a minute before) are gone. The overlay icons are still there but the context menu is gone, too. I guess Tortoise is pretty much unusable without the context menu, so this is just to make the Explorer work again.

My Windows 10 is Version 1809 Build 17763.379.

[Sysopsub]

Summary: TSVN was probably not the performance killer.

The performance problems appeared without opening a context menu.

I uninstalled TSVN, but my PC became slow again and again. (Many reboots were involved) It turned out that the MSSE on-access virus scanner made access to every file extremely slow and my PC unusable. This does not begin at system start, but sometimes later. It scans every file even within my excluded types (like .iso) and even if it had read it right before. I think the additional file accesses for explorer operations, context menu and TSVN overlay symbols made them look the worst and thus the core problem. Without real-time scanning, the PC remains sane, although a few things like loading a website still perform badly. When I occasionally use my much older WXP PC (also on SSD), GUI and OS react swiftly in comparison to my newer one.

That seems to leave me with the problem: how do I get the overlays back to work. ;-) Oh well, they are not that important, scripts will do the thing and I am used to working without any GUI, colour monitor and mouse.

[mauric...@googlemail.com]

I had this problem with Explorer hanging sometimes for a long time (years...), but finally figured out how to reproduce and fix it.

For me the cause of all my problems was a shared network folder that I had pinned to my quick access. If it wasn't reachable, explorer would hang on nearly every right click and icon overlays would take forever to show up.

There are two ways to fix this. The obvious one would be to remove the shared folder from quick access. Alternatively you can add "\\" to the excluded paths for icon overlays (or probably the complete path that's in quick access, haven't tested that though). I haven't tested this for a long time but so far it seems to work.

I hope this helps others as well.