Markus's dashboard

I noticed this too. I also tried a cmd-line cp from /Volumes which was somewhat faster than a Finder copy, it was still about an order of magnitude slower than Transmit.

It is with SFTP (and ExpanDrive 2.01) but as I said, it is not really reproducible and since even when everything works it can take quite a while for a folder to become populated, I have since changed my workflow and tar all files before opening and copying. Far faster than a Finder copy. I am afraid I won't be able to give any further datapoints since for performance reasons (which I don't think are your fault) I am avoiding the situations where I had seen beachballing.

I think the underlying problem is the limit shells impose on the length of the argument list. If you have a folder containing 10000 or more files named testxxxxx.txt (with xxxxx representing a number) and you do a rm test*.txt, the shell will expand this command to 'rm test10001.txt test10002.txt ...'. Unfortunately, the maximum length of this argument list is roughly 100000, ie, for a 10 letter file name that means about 10000 files max. If it gets over that limit, you will get a message like this:
-bash: /bin/rm: Argument list too long
Most likely some of the underlying code in ExpanDrive at some point when opening/viewing a folder with more then about 10000 files will send such an expanded list to a shell. The shell will complain and ExpanDrive or the Finder will get stuck.

I am seeing inconsistent behaviour [with ExpanDrive 2.0.1 on OS X 10.5.7], sometimes the Finder beachballs sometimes it works (but slowly, count minutes to open a folder, even though is most likely a limitation of the Finder in conjunction with 'slowish' network connection). Thus, I think ExpanDrive has fixed the underlying issues and is now stuck with a Finder pushed to its limits.

The developer of Blue Harvest pointed my to a whitelist functionality (that I had thought referred only one aspect of Blue Harvest but in fact covers everything) that allows me to exclude my ExpanDrive drives from Blue Harvest. Everything works fine now, no constant authentification dialogues and also no invisible files on the server. – Markus, on February 27, 2009 11:28

I've forwarded the info given by you to Blue Harvest's developer (incl. the offer to work with him). I agree that the ball is in his court now. – Markus, on February 25, 2009 11:10

Blue Harvest still regularly asks for the admin password (using BH 1.5.0b4). According to the Blue Harvest developer this is due to the items in the Disks section (in Advanced mode in Blue Harvest), ie, .fseventsd, Spotlight-V100, .Trashes etc. being removed by Blue Harvest.

I got a reply from the developer of BlueHarvest. This is triggered by ExpanDrive mounting servers like non-HFS disks (or local volumes). BlueHarvest tries to delete items like .Spotlight-V100 from these and needs an admin password for this.