Lion grinds to a halt when a network volume is mounted

Question

Ok, so I've got a network drive that I mount infrequently, but when i do the OS grinds to a halt. I don't think it's Spotlight because it doesn't tell me it's indexing the drive in the Spotlight tab. I've tried adding it to the privacy tab in Preferences too but that makes no difference. iStat Menus sometimes shows big spikes of CPU usage across all cores at the time, yet oddly at others it doesn't. The network section of iStat also shows wildly varying network traffic whilst it's happening too, sometimes upto 3MB/s, but this fluctuates all over the place.
What can I use to try and track down what's happening? It's a fairly easy bug to reproduce, but the system is pretty unusable while it's actually happening; can take 10-15 seconds to respond to a click because of the inevitable beachball of doom. Any suggestions?
Just in case it helps, it's a Samba share from a ZFS filesystem.

Answer 1

I use an ATI Radeon HD 2600 Pro with dual monitors and its certainly not a top of the range card nor as SteveG suggests should it be.
> Maybe it's just me, but could you please explain how a faster drive makes a difference to the performance when zoomed in? Because on the face of it, that makes no sense.
It could have something to do with the alignment of the planets rather than the faster hard drive but all I can do is give the facts, my observations and logical conclusions :-)
Zoom in for really close work with large track count recorded at 44.1k with a 7200 rpm drive and I would have an annoying lag of about 2ish seconds enough to really disrupt workflow.
Do nothing else but add a 10k rpm drive and make that my primary work drive - problem gone.
Think about the logic of it for a minute.
You are somewhere say in the middle of the song you zoom in (I'm thinking just now while I'm typing - which is novel in itself - that Steve you may be thinking that the lag is in the zoom - its not and that could be the confusion but I'll continue) and press play. AA has to load the tracks position the file pointers of all track at the beginning of the file then move each pointer to the position in the song for each track to your zoom point and then play the tracks.
Worse for 48k files and probably worse (can't tell cause I usually have heaps of edits) with heaps of slices as each is a virtual copy of the original track.
That's a lot of work and a lot of data to move around - I'm seriosly looking at the solid state drives with lower seek times.
BlairT you have some serious PC issues cause that machine should be coping without a problem.