Faster preview generation over the network

TL;DR:

Generating previews for RAW files over the network is slow and there may be low-hanging fruit to pick up for performance boosts.

Preamble:

I am using C1 23 on Windows. I have my catalog on a local disk and my RAW files on a network drive, on a fast server, connected over a 1GBit copper link.

I like to generate my previews before I start working. After a long shooting, there can be thousands of files and it is important to me that I can browse them quickly.

The preview generation phase looks very slow to me; I'm shooting 42 MP RAW files with a Sony A7RIII and, looking at the Activities dialog, I see about 1-2 previews being generated each second.

Opening the Task Manager, I see this:

which suggests to me that I'm paying the latency cost of opening a file over the network.

I imagine that this would get faster if C1 could do one or more of the following:

1. read ahead the RAW files into a (small) buffer queue

2. spawn multiple concurrent threads for preview generation, since in this case it is an I/O bound process, not a compute-bound process.

I have inspected a few of the preview-related issues in this tracker, and I see that preview generation is usually compute-bound: i.e. I read the complaint by the user who wants to be able to stop the generation while they are editing. But it appearsnot to be, in my case.

What problem do you see this solving?

Preview generation is slow, a bit frustratingly so, because I host my photo files on a network drive, and I am guessing that it could easily get faster.

When was the last time you were affected by this lack of functionality, or specific tool?

Today. It affects me every time I have more than 100-200 pics in one import.