Drive Explorer - Folder Size Visibility & Performance Transparency

Problem statement / real-life scenario:
When working with Drive Explorer in Planning Analytics Workspace (PAW), administrators and power users frequently need to review folder details to understand performance issues. In real production environments, folders can range from a few megabytes to tens of gigabytes. Currently, Drive Explorer allows viewing folder details only one folder at a time, and there is no visibility of folder size at folder-list level.

As confirmed by IBM Support (case TS021008949), folders with large sizes (e.g. 8–70+ GB) naturally take significantly longer to load, while smaller folders load quickly. However, users have no way to know the folder size upfront, which makes the UI appear unreliable or partially broken when "View Details" takes a long time to respond.

Current workaround:

• Users must open folders one by one and wait for details to load

• Folder size information is discovered only after a potentially long wait

• Trial-and-error approach when diagnosing performance issues

• External documentation or manual tracking of large folders

Proposed solution:
Enhance Drive Explorer with one or more of the following capabilities:

• Display folder size directly in the Drive Explorer list view

• Allow multi-folder selection with aggregated or individual size visibility

• Provide a warning or indicator for large folders (e.g. "Large folder – may load slowly")

• Optional: background/preloaded size calculation to avoid blocking the UI

Benefits / value:

• Improved transparency and user experience

• Reduced perception of defects or broken functionality

• Faster root-cause analysis for performance issues

• Less reliance on IBM Support for "expected behavior" cases

• Increased administrator productivity and confidence

Frequency of impact

• High – encountered regularly when managing or reviewing Drive Explorer content in production environments