Advanced mode in FileManager slows default admin theme

[scooper]

Right - this is related to this Slow backend (admin) thread but I wanted to get the info out into a separate discussion.

We've been having issues with the admin area of one site in particular being very slow. Pages would typically take 20 secs to render.

After reading a comment in the above thread I tried switching back to the NCleanGrey theme and noticed a dramatically improved response time.

After a bit of poking around with OneEleven I found that if I took the FileManger Dropzone out of the template things were back to a decent speed.

So... it turns out that I had checked the 'Enable Advanced Mode' checkbox in FileManager to enable me to browse outside of the Uploads directory. This resulted in the drop down list in the Change Working Directory modal being 750 lines long because it contained the entire file system under public_html.

Once I'd disabled 'Advance Mode' so it just listed directories under /uploads then it was much faster (still had 250 entries before I tidied up but much better).

I'm not sure if the FileManager dropzone action is cached and if it isn't then that might be a quick solution, but in my opinion having the file system scanned on every admin page load is an unnecessary overhead. Users aren't going to be changing the upload target very often - certainly not every page load.

I think it would be much more suitable to load the directory list via ajax only when the user wants to change their upload target. That way we could get rid of the FileManger dropzone call from the pagetemplate which should improve speed all round.

s.

[paulbaker]

Good stuff, scooper. I checked a plain-vanilla 2.0.1.1 site and you're right. Looking at the raw HTML there is pages of available directories because like you, I set my File Manager to Advanced Mode on because it makes it easy to upload files outside the uploads directory.

I rarely use the Dropzone anyway - I normally have a tab open showing the File Manager and use that.

Your ajax idea sounds like a good one.