Traversing through folders very slow (Rpi4, SMB, offline, NAS)

    I am using LibreELEC 11.0.3 on a Raspberry Pi 4 with 4GB RAM. It's connected to a Synology NAS via LAN and it's in no way connected to the internet. Files are accessed via SMB, because I want the user authentication (seems to not work with NFS).

    My issue is that two things are very, VERY slow:

    • traversing through the folders on the NAS
    • starting the video file for playback

    Both of these take minutes!! Since I have a multi-layered folder structure on my NAS, starting a video can, all in all, take an hour or more. This is obviously unacceptable.

    This is my first try to use LibreELEC and Kodi, so this might be a n00b question, but how can I speed things up?

    I have of course tried to find answers in the forum before posting, but haven't found an adequate answer.

    Some more information (not sure if relevant):

    • The NAS is connected to one other computer which was turned off for testing, so the issue cannot be multiple access / reaching network capacity
    • The NAS can be somewhat sluggish when accessed via macOS sometimes, but never this slow.
    • Once playback of the video has started, it works perfectly. No hiccups, no breaks - I can watch it all in one go, I can pause, I can add subs etc. LibreELEC itself, all menus etc. work perfectly fine as well.
    • I'm a bit confused concerning indexing of the folders I added to the "Movies" and the "TV Shows" categories. I expected video files to be listed / clustered somehow in a native Kodi-style after indexing / adding them to the categories, but I still have to traverse the NAS folders manually to watch a video? Did I maybe do something wrong when setting the folders up?

    Thank you guys so much for the support! If I can provide any additional info, please tell me what to provide.

    You probably need to share a Kodi debug log for anyone to comment on what might be happening. As someone using an RPi4 for the family daily driver and with all media stored on a Synology NAS accessed over SMB .. I can state that don't see large delays in playback start (it's near instant) so it's something odd and specific to your environment.

    Did you ever solve this?

    I have a similar setup and things started getting slow some weeks ago.

    Just had no time to investgate yet.