I'm bumping up against a problem in Ventura that I've not experienced in previous versions of macOS. I've got RAID arrays that may have 300K to 400K files on them, organized in folders by Year, and then by Date within Year. These are raw images from many different cameras. My primary RAID array (formatted at RAID 5 with 4 large drives) has about 4 TB worth of files on it. My secondary RAID has 4 medium sized drives with a backup of the primary RAID, also with roughly 4 TB worth of files. The individual files may total between 300,000 and 400,000 files (I haven't actually counted).
I'm seeing a number of programs, including the Ventura (beta 11) Finder choke while trying to load and simply stall out. I see this happening on a Mac Studio Ultra, but not on an Intel i9 iMac. They are both running identical software, but the Intel machine has fewer files on the RAID arrays (perhaps 100,000 files arrayed over approximately the same number of folders organized the same way).
As far as I can tell, the programs that have problems with this seem to use Finder or the Xcode API calls for the Finder to access the files, while programs that don't have problems don't seem to use the API to make their calls on the Folder architecture. This makes a huge difference on the Mac Silicon machines, but doesn't seem to have an effect on machines with the Intel architecture.
Is this an issue with the number of files, the number of folders, the. machine architecture, or the operating system combined with the system architecture.
I can take a very small subset of the files and load them on a RAID array formatted identically (RAID 4 or RAID 5) and not run into difficulty, but the full meal seems to cause Finder serious indigestion.
What, if anything, is going on here?
