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At work, I would like to use KDE's dolphin as a file manager. However, our home directories reside on an AFS share [1]. When starting dolphin, it becomes unresponsive for dozens of minutes.

stracing it reveals that it tries to open all the nodes in our AFS tree:

openat(AT_FDCWD, "/afs/somewhereElse.tld", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK|O_DIRECTORY|O_CLOEXEC

I need to stop dolphin from doing that; this behaviour makes the program completely unusable on AFS trees. Is there some setting that controls this?

[1] If you have never worked with AFS before, for the sake of this question, assume that there is a root directory that has subtrees from different universities, research institutes etc. mounted below it. The data in those subtrees really reside at the remote sites, so access is slow and resource-intensive.

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  • I thought the whole point of AFS is to use caching to make this not a problem.
    – Mechanical snail
    Jan 2, 2013 at 3:38

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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While this doesn't completely solve the problem raised here, there is an option called -dynroot-sparse in the OpenAFS client these days, which tries to reduce the number of directories that are visible under /afs. That can help avoid processes from trying to traverse all AFS cells in the world just by reading the directories in /afs (but it doesn't prevent anything from traversing everything in your local cell). See afsd(8).

KDE stuff just really needs to detect networked filesystems, and default to not traversing the whole thing (many programs do similar things, just by detecting certain filesystems like AFS, NFS, sshfs, etc). Here is a bug about this general issue, if you want to raise this there: https://bugs.kde.org/show_bug.cgi?id=178678. It sounds like this is still a problem.

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  • This is probably a good temporary solution. The -dynroot-sparse option (described here: docs.openafs.org/Reference/8/afsd.html) was created specifically to deal with situations like this.
    – jsbillings
    May 11, 2014 at 1:22
  • I doubt that I can get our AFS admins to enable this flag for our huge cell just to let me check it out, but thanks for the pointer!
    – jstarek
    May 15, 2014 at 8:57
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    @jstarek To be clear, this flag only needs to be specified on a client machine; for example, your workstation. If you don't have administrative access to that machine, then yeah, they might need some convincing; but it's a pretty common option for desktop-y machines, and it could be a good idea to turn on anyway.
    – adeason
    May 30, 2014 at 0:47
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Do you have previews enabled? I know that my system reads the current directory, and one level deeper to be able to show the cute mini-icons on the folders indicating the contents. Turning this off should help.

Does this happen on EVERY start of dolphin? or just the first one? The system may be building the file-system cache by reading things. Although I'm not sure why it would read the ENTIRE structure. Do you have some sort of indexing software running?

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  • While disabling all preview functionality helped (thanks for that hint), the folder tree view (F7) still seems to try to open all folders. I don't quite understand this, since the first level of directories below the AFS root is cached locally and can be displayed without noticable delays in all other programs.
    – jstarek
    Jul 6, 2012 at 7:58
  • It's probably the folder-tree-view that's causing the delays, apparently it wants to enumerate the ENTIRE tree so it can display it quicker/easier. Hmmm. Ok... Now I know what to look for.
    – lornix
    Jul 6, 2012 at 8:00
  • Are you quite sure Nepomuk and Soprano (and Akonadi) are not running? Check under "Desktop Search" in "System Settings". That can grind a system to a halt, especially over networked filesystems. May need to log out/in after deselecting that.
    – lornix
    Jul 6, 2012 at 8:24
  • Sorry for the late reply, I didn't see your comment here. Both systems are turned off.
    – jstarek
    Aug 15, 2012 at 10:52

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