I keep seeing thread running called Device Lanman Redirector, could this have anything to do with it?
My files are on a network drive.
The
LANMan Redirector is the Windows "client" network file system driver. It is the software part of Windows that allows your computer to access files located on remote network shares, so it is related to the files on your network drive. The "counterpart" of this which
serves the files is called LANMan Server.
You really shouldn't see this process take a lot of CPU time, unless you are actively transferring large files over the network (or if there are problems with your network).
A couple of questions:
1) You said your files are on the network drive. Does this mean only the media files, or the library database files as well? If so,
you might be having this problem. MC heavily accesses those database files and it performs much better if they are on a local drive. Having the media files on a network drive is fine.
2) Is your network wired or wireless?
3) Have you scanned for Spyware and Viruses recently? Spyware and Virus activity can cause lots of disk access (as they scan your hard drives and network drives for info to collect on you).
4) You may want to exclude your network drive from being watched by your Anti-Virus application. This can cause similar problems, as every time you "touch" a file on the network drive, the AV program will try to scan the file first. Look in the help file for how to exclude certain files and folders (in Symantec Anti-Virus Corporate there's an option to exclude Network Drives which works, but I don't know how to do it on other apps).
5) Is your network reliably transferring data? Try pinging another device or computer on the network a bunch and make sure none of them are dropped or have freakishly high ping times. To ping more than 4 times (the default) use this command at the Command Prompt:
ping -n 10000 <IP or Hostname>
(that'll ping 10,000 times)
Another thing good thing to do is to test copying files for corruption using Md5 sums to make sure they match. Do this:
1. Create or grab a batch of files (some big and some small), put them all in a couple of folders somewhere on your local drive.
2. Generate MD5 hashes of the files.
A good program to use for this is MD5Summer if you want a free GUI app. When you run it, it'll ask you what "root folder" you want to scan. Simply pick the folder containing the files you want to scan, and then click "Create Sums". Select all the files and click Add (or if there are sub-folders, click "Add recursively").
3. Save the MD5 sum file. MD5Summer should do this automatically.
4. Transfer the files back and forth across the network all at once (it works best if you start multiple copy processes going all at once -- that's why I said "a couple of folders").
5. Once you're done copying, test the new copies with MD5Summer to make sure the hashes match (if you simply double click on the new copy of the Md5 file you created originally, MD5Summer should launch and test them all for you).
6. If they don't all pass, you've got issues. That means your network is corrupting data. This is often caused by hardware problems (bad network interface, bad cabling, overclocking, etc), but can also be software (bad drivers, viruses, spyware).