What is Finder doing when it has a spinner in the bottom-right?

Question

Whenever I open a folder on a remote network share that hasn't been opened since I last booted, Finder displays this animated spinner in the bottom-right (see picture below) for about 30 seconds and won't display any of the folder's contents until it's done doing whatever it's doing. Even if the folder's empty, or only contains one file.

This makes browsing the share painfully slow for seemingly no reason. Why's it doing this? I should note that I've disabled .DS_Store files littering network shares using defaults write com.apple.desktopservices DSDontWriteNetworkStores true, so maybe that's why. I'm kind of hoping it's something else, though.

Edit: This is a local network share over Samba.

Answer 1

It needs to load the folder listing from the remote share before it can display it. This is way faster (almost seamless) on local-area shares, but on Internet shares it depends on many things like your latency, the remote server's workload etc.

The number of files in the remote share has some bearing on how long this takes, but there's still a trip from your computer to the remote, requesting a listing, returning that and displaying it.

P.S. The spinner is a system-wide 'loading' symbol. You get that when your system boots up as well, when Safari loads a page etc.

P.P.S. Depending on what kind of remote shares you use, take a look at Transmit 4 as you might find it superior to the Finder.