Postscript ...
Pondering ... pondering ...
"removing
auto-unprotect removes problem"
"problem is the unusually long time-delay"
"What's causing the time-delay?"
OK, so focussing on that time-delay ... more than 60 seconds and problems arise ... and, with
auto-unprotect installed, it's something happening on BoxA that is not happening on BoxB ...
Is
auto-unprotect scanning files in that time-delay?
According to Web-if, BoxA and BoxB have roughly similar number of files on them, so any difference in delay should be minimal.
In 'exactitude', Web-if and SUI report BoxA actually has a few
less files and GiB stored, so should take less time to scan than BoxB. Hmmmmm...
However, it occurred to me that Web-if doesn't always tell the whole story, so I looked into BoxA via
Samba - and although the GiB stored figure matches the figures reported on Web-if and SUI - the number of files does not ... 'Properties' via
Samba shows
37,346 more files on BoxA than are reported by Web-if ...
...
Completely mystified, I ploughed through the folder layers and eventually found the blighters. Thousands of identical .nts files that are all 0KB in size, so they take up no storage space and Web-if doesn't recognise them.
Invisible ... except to something that has to scan files?
It looks like it is a 'crop' that failed and left an endless repeat trail of orphans, all dated 21/11/2013.
This date rang bells, and I vaguely remembered some problems with nicesplice ... so I looked back through the forum - and lo, Drutt posted about a revised and updated version of nicesplice on Nov 21st 2013, and said that time-shifted files were nasty to process.
(post #11 -
http://hummy.tv/forum/threads/crop-failed.4064/ and
http://hummy.tv/forum/threads/nicesplice-problem.3813/page-2
The 37, 346 .nts files were all for a time-shifted recording that was being cropped.
Scanning that many files would make a significant time-delay. This may be it? Or maybe not. Either way, I want to delete them ... I have tried 'Select All' then 'Delete' - but so far the page has gone white and frozen .... Any suggestions for the safest and most time-economical way to delete thirty-seven thousand files?!