Thumbnail generation problem on Synology DS213

[bizzy]

Hey everyone,

I have a DS213 at my business that we mainly use for photos and documents. We have about 11-12 computers that access the NAS. We have ~51,000 pictures over 9 GB stored over 4 folders with 12 subfolders that we need access to daily (there are more pictures stored on the NAS, but they are not accessed frequently or at all).

The pictures load very slow, as well as thumbnails taking forever or not loading at all. Also, the loading will usually freeze when trying to search for a particular item. All the pictures were originally lumped into 4 huge folders, but we separated everything by year in order to try to alleviate the issues. I tried searching for fixes on the web and it seems this thumbnail problem is a fairly common problem with the Synology devices.

We have an outside IT consultant who has been trying to fix this problem for weeks but still has not been able to find the issue. We have tried to restart the NAS multiple times, reinstalled the OS, deleted the thumbnail cache on every workstation, but the problem still persists. Any help/suggestions to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

 

[BuddhaSkoota]

I have a DS213 at my business that we mainly use for photos and documents. We have about 11-12 computers that access the NAS. We have ~51,000 pictures over 9 GB stored over 4 folders with 12 subfolders that we need access to daily (there are more pictures stored on the NAS, but they are not accessed frequently or at all).

The pictures load very slow, as well as thumbnails taking forever or not loading at all. Also, the loading will usually freeze when trying to search for a particular item. All the pictures were originally lumped into 4 huge folders, but we separated everything by year in order to try to alleviate the issues. I tried searching for fixes on the web and it seems this thumbnail problem is a fairly common problem with the Synology devices.

We have an outside IT consultant who has been trying to fix this problem for weeks but still has not been able to find the issue. We have tried to restart the NAS multiple times, reinstalled the OS, deleted the thumbnail cache on every workstation, but the problem still persists. Any help/suggestions to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Are clients wired or wireless? Slow thumbnail loading could be due to a bandwidth issue rather than a server issue. I'd suggest connect a PC directly to the NAS to help isolate the problem. If thumbnails appear quickly, there will likely be a bottleneck in your network that would require further investigation.

Have you considered further dividing your folders by month? It should be relatively easy to do and would keep the server from having to deliver a year's worth of thumbnails to each client that requests it.

 

[bizzy]

I have a DS213 at my business that we mainly use for photos and documents. We have about 11-12 computers that access the NAS. We have ~51,000 pictures over 9 GB stored over 4 folders with 12 subfolders that we need access to daily (there are more pictures stored on the NAS, but they are not accessed frequently or at all).

The pictures load very slow, as well as thumbnails taking forever or not loading at all. Also, the loading will usually freeze when trying to search for a particular item. All the pictures were originally lumped into 4 huge folders, but we separated everything by year in order to try to alleviate the issues. I tried searching for fixes on the web and it seems this thumbnail problem is a fairly common problem with the Synology devices.

We have an outside IT consultant who has been trying to fix this problem for weeks but still has not been able to find the issue. We have tried to restart the NAS multiple times, reinstalled the OS, deleted the thumbnail cache on every workstation, but the problem still persists. Any help/suggestions to fix this problem would be greatly appreciated. Thanks!

Are clients wired or wireless? Slow thumbnail loading could be due to a bandwidth issue rather than a server issue. I'd suggest connect a PC directly to the NAS to help isolate the problem. If thumbnails appear quickly, there will likely be a bottleneck in your network that would require further investigation.

Have you considered further dividing your folders by month? It should be relatively easy to do and would keep the server from having to deliver a year's worth of thumbnails to each client that requests it.

All the workstations that access the NAS are using a wired connection. I believe we have about 5 different switches that link to the main switch.

Thanks for the suggestion, I'll try connecting a laptop or something directly to the NAS to try to isolate the problem.

The main problem with splitting up the folders by month is that our employees need to search for a picture by style number, such as 1234 or 9876, so they need to search the entire folder for that item anyway. I figured since splitting it by year didn't really help, I didn't think splitting it up further would do anything. Would splitting up the folders help with the speed, even though they are still searching an entire folder for the item?

Also, we tried installing Picasa on a couple employees computers which seems to have helped with the thumbnail generation (was using ACDSee). However, the other computers on the network are still having problems even after installing Picasa on them.