I started using Crytomator a couple of years ago, but jumped straight to Mountain Duck, so had very little experience with the core Cryptomator app. I now want to use just the Cryptomator app, but am having some serious performance issues where browsing directories, loading files etc result in freeze-ups, long delays etc. From reading other posts here; I’ve seen similar issues reported with earlier versions, but many posts indicating that the performance I’m experiencing isn’t normal.
My setup: Cryptomator 1.5.5, Windows 10 (1909), Unifi networking gear, vaults stored on a Synology Diskstation on my local network. Network otherwise working fine and typically not congested. Both vaults I use are large, containing several hundred GB - mixture of archives, media, documents. I don’t have any “applications” running from the vaults.
Background: I started using Cryptomator a couple of years ago, but started with the Mountain Duck app. I had some initial performance problems (same as I am experiencing now), but found that selecting the SFTP protocol made things adequate.
Current Problem: Vault access is very slow. Browsing from one directory to another often takes 30+ seconds, small sub-1mb files can sometimes be relatively fast, but often sometimes take a long time to load. Sometimes trying to change directories causes a long pause, but the directory doesn’t actually change. Opening larger. files e.g.: 2gb video might take a few minutes to appear and then require repeated buffering in VLC player every few seconds. I don’t get any thumbnails generated at all when browsing directories. Overall this makes Cryptomator quite unusable in a practical way. I’ve noticed that after clicking to change folder, or load a file; the entire cryptomator drive seems to freeze; I can’t click to a different icon and the windows title bar will show a “not responding” message. During these long pauses, the Cryptomator app window is still responsive, but the read/written shows “idle”. However, if I look at the network tab in Windows “Task Manager” I get a spike in network traffic of “Send: 0.9-1.3Mbps” and a similar amount of traffic on “Receive”. This lasts for the duration of the pause.
Things I Have Tried:
- Switching from Dokany to WebDav - doesn’t seem to make much difference. If anything, WebDav seems worse; but I get the same behaviour characterised by long pauses.
- Using custom mount options with Dokany - I read people had improved performance by increasing the thread/timeout values by a factor of 10. This doesn’t seem to make a difference for me.
- Diabling WIndows Defender firewall - I’ve done this through the control panel - no change. I tried using a custom registry key, but upon restart, I wasn’t sure whether Defender was truly disabled as I could still access the control panel for it. I read in another thread that someone ran Wireshark on their machine and saw crytomator resulted in “the SMB protocol sends a special request for each file: “GetInfo Request: FILE INFO”. This request is answered with “INVALID_INFO_CLASS”. I guess that’s the reason for the hugh traffic”. This feels really similar to my problem.
- Disabling 3rd Party Anti-Virus/Malware software: I was running Avast, Malwarebytes and CCleaner. I’ve tried uninstalling these, but again no difference.
- Disabling as many non-vital apps as possible - I’ve uninstalled OneDrive, DropBox, Megasync, Resilio and tried running Crytomator with as little active on the system as possible. No difference.
- Making a new vault with not many files. This does seem faster: I can make a new vault and copy files to it, I get an average of over 10MB/s copying files into the share. This would appear plenty fast enough to have quite snappy performance for browsing uploaded files. (Although if I try to change directories in one of my older vaults, I get the dreaded “pause” again and the transfer to the new vault stops for the period that it lasts). WIth a few GB copied to a new vault, things seem OK - I can browse directories and open documents/archives/pictures/video with little to no delay or buffering. I still don’t get any thumbnails generated. This might seem to suggest it is a problem with my vaults, or files inside my vault. One of them is all family photos/videos that I’ve taken/scanned myself - so pretty standard picture/video formats and things like a Adobe Lightroom catalogue file.
I’d really like to figure out what the problem is. Given that Cryptomator is so obviously working great for so many others, I think my system/config/vault contents are causing some sort of issue. Grateful for any advice as to what I can try or steps to troubleshoot.
Thanks!