Mounted Drive takes very long to show all icons of content

General
1

I have been facing this problem with my remote drive which has the contents encrypted using ‘Crypt’.

Problem: I have a folder named ‘Softwares’ where I have stored various softwares. These softwares are improtant to me which I have been using for last 10-15 years. Whenever I try to mount this encrypted remote, it gets mounted immediately, without any issues. However, when I open the folders, the PC becomes way too sluggish. The top left corner of opened window starts showing circular motion, which depicts ‘busy’ status of Operating system. It takes anywhere from 1 min to 10 mins depending on the type of folder opened to behave normal. For the period of sluggishness, while I can work in any other folder or browse but the folder which has been opened becomes almost unresponsive.

Usage Environment :

My OS is Win 11 Home

PC is Lenovo LOX (but the problem is being faced in other PCs as well).

Cloud Service Provider : Koofr.

Network speed is 100 Mbps broadband.

The folder structure of my encrypted remote is 2 or anywhere upto 5 levels deeper as I have few more folders within this ‘Softwares’ folder. This keeps my contents more organised.

Total files are around 15,808 as on date, with most of them being the installers and associated files. Folder count is 2346 and the contents of this remote are 106 GB in Size. These figures keep changing but the change is not frequent as the usage is home use and only I update/ download/ upload these files. This activity takes once in 2-3 days for few odd (3-4 files) files.

Other Indicators. After mounting this remote and on opening folders, I have observed few unique things:

  1. My network activity increases with downloads being undertaken by rclone.exe. This download continues for the entire duration of sluggishness. This duration could be 1 min or 10 mins depending upon the size of folder or its contents.
  2. When opened, the sub-folders are displayed without any icons of files inside them. Similarly, the files within the sub-folder are displayed with the default icon of unidentified files. As time progresses, folders start showing the icons of their contents and icons of files start showing (the OEM provided icons for them). By the time sluggishness is over, all files are displayed with their icons correctly.
  3. This problem has been faced not just with RcloneView but also when I mount the encrypted drive with command line through powershell.
  4. I have other remotes which are encrypted using crypt but they don’t display such behaviour. These remotes are with Koofr as well as pCloud. This particular troublesome remote is dedicated to all kind of softwares, is with Koofr, and displays this problematic behaviour.

Any kind of input or help would be highly appreciated.

2

Welcome to the community, hansrajbhatt!

Your issue is a classic interaction between Windows Shell’s icon rendering engine and a rclone Crypt-mounted virtual filesystem. Let me break it down.

Root Cause

When Windows Explorer opens a folder, it doesn’t just list files — it also tries to:

  1. Resolve icons for each file, and for executable files (.exe, .msi, .zip, etc.), Windows actually reads inside the file to extract embedded icons.
  2. Trigger hundreds or thousands of simultaneous metadata/read requests against the mounted drive.
  3. Because of the Crypt layer, rclone must decrypt each file name and partially download file content to satisfy these requests — which explains the sustained rclone.exe network activity you observed.

This is why your other remotes (documents, photos) don’t behave the same way — their icons are determined purely by file extension, so no actual file content needs to be read. A folder full of software installers is essentially a worst-case scenario for this behavior.

Immediate Workarounds (Windows Explorer)

1. Change Explorer view mode
Switch the folder view to Details or List instead of Icons or Tiles. This significantly reduces the number of icon rendering requests Explorer makes.

2. Disable thumbnail previews
Go to Folder Options → View → Always show icons, never thumbnails and enable it. This prevents Windows from reading file contents for icon extraction.

Optimizing Mount Settings in RcloneView

You can tune the cache settings directly from the mount configuration GUI:

Cache mode
Change the Cache mode dropdown from writes to full. This enables full VFS caching, so files are read into local cache first, dramatically reducing repeated round-trips to the cloud.

Cache max size
The default shown is 1073741824 (1.00 GB). If you have disk space to spare, consider increasing this to accommodate more cached files from your Softwares folder.

Cache max age
Currently set to 3600000000000 (60 minutes). You can increase this — for example, 21600000000000 for 6 hours — so cached content stays valid longer between sessions.

Dir cache time
Currently 300000000000 (5 minutes). Increase this to 259200000000000 (72 hours) so the directory listing is held in memory and Explorer does not re-fetch the full file tree on every folder open. This alone can make a noticeable difference.

All time values are in nanoseconds. To convert: multiply your desired minutes by 60000000000, or hours by 3600000000000.

Why This Drive Specifically?

Your other Crypt remotes likely contain documents or media files whose icons are resolved by extension alone. This particular remote is dedicated to software installers — a file type where Windows insists on reading the binary to render the correct icon. With 15,000+ files across 2,300+ folders, the cumulative effect becomes severe.

This is not a misconfiguration on your end. It is a structural friction between Windows Shell, virtual filesystems, and the Crypt encryption layer. You will find similar reports in the broader rclone community.

Hope this helps — let us know if the workarounds make a difference!

3

Thank you so much for your detailed response to my query!!

My issue has been resolved by just implementing the changes mentioned by your ‘Immediate Workarounds (Windows Explorer)’. While I did incorporate the changes as suggested under ‘Optimising Mount Settings in RcloneView’, but I realised that they wont help me much as I don’t frequent the folders very often after opening them once. Yes, if the option of ‘Cache Max Age’, was for few days instead of max 6 hrs, it would have indeed been much more useful for me. But its nice for me to know what are the max and min limitations. Thanks for providing that info as well.

So, under presently available settings these limitations would give me a faster access only if I revisit more frequently, so I will keep that in mind.

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