Autofs on NAS slows down any "Save as.." Dialog, mounts every volume before display

English Network/Internet
1

I use a Synology NAS in my Network. I have configured several network shares from there as NFS4 volumes as autofs mounts.

Problem: Save dialogs take up to 1min to open
because everytime I want so save a file the NAS wakes up and spins up its harddisks, even when I want to save it local. The save dialog appears on my screen when the network shares could be mounted.

I thought autofs would be exactly against this kind of behavior.
It happens for example every time I want so save an image or PDF in Firefox.

Example line from /etc/auto.nas:
linux -rw,suid,soft,intr,defaults,rsize=32768,wsize=32768,fstype=nfs4 nas.lan:/volume1/linux

/etc/autofs.conf is in default state. Timeout ist 5min. Spindown of harddisks happens in the NAS after 10min of no traffic/use.

I guess the save dialog scans every possible path where I could want to save to and thereby involuntarily mounts all volumes on the NAS, which is blocking.
Am I missing an option on the nfs mount or autofs daemon?

Thanks in advance,

Frerk

2

I assume that “Save as” dialog is used in a Desktop. To make the picture is bit more complete, can you please tell which desktop?

After all it is most probably the desktop “Save as” function that wakes up all the mounts.

3

I use the standard KDE Desktop:

Operating System: openSUSE Leap 15.2
KDE Plasma Version: 5.18.5
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.71.0
Qt Version: 5.12.7
Kernel Version: 5.3.18-lp152.50-default
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 4 × Intel® Core™ i7-4600U CPU @ 2.10GHz
Memory: 7,5 GiB

When I use a KDE application like Kate, the save dialog opens instantly.
When I use a non KDE application like Firefox, it takes some time.

In the save dialog there appeared an entry “Fremdgerät” like “foreign devices” with Network and some network share for photos.
This could be the problem. I wonder why it only displays the network share for photos, since I hava others as well. I don’t remember how it got there.

I try to get rid of it and see what happens.

I have added some places (favorites) in Dolphin, some of them pointing to network shares /mounted directory. I guess this shouldn’t be a problem.

For every test I need some time for the timeouts to kick in and have another try.
I could lower them.

Thanks for your reply.

Frerk

4

Further analysis:

  • Kate (KDE) : save: no wait
  • LibreOffice (non-KDE): save: no wait
  • Firefox (non-KDE): save: 23 s wait

I seems to be only a problem of Firefox. What I don’t understand: The save dialog of LibreOffice and Firefox are the same. So where does the difference in time came from?

I will try to save an image on a non NAS path in Firefox, so it does not appear as first entry of the history.

Frerk

5

That might be a good point. And use a NAS file with LibreOffice to check the other way around.

6

Saving to a local destination in Firefox did not prevent the problem.

Saving an email from Thundebird did not cause the problem, although it is as near as one could get to firefox.

I saved an email from Thunderbird to the NAS to replicate the behavior.
And I will search into the histrory of Firefox and clear it before clicking on Save as…

Greetings,

Frerk