Rclone sharepoint: really good at browsing - how? :-)

Hi rclone praise :slight_smile:

I'm a user of rclone (primary for S3 protocol, on and off for sftp; and now also for SharePoint/Microsoft OneDrive for certain tasks there). rclone is a project that keeps giving!

The last days I've been evaluating commercial tools on Windows for a project where rclone is not the best option (we need a seamingless experience, I see that someone could build what I need using rclone as core).

I couldn't resist comparing rclone with the commercial tools.

My praise: mounting SharePoint (same protocol as OneDrive, right?) using rclone: browsing, on Windows File Explorer, folders and listing files is VERY fast (expanding folders, opening new folders to see their files). Faster than some other tools. Is rclone using Microsoft Graph only? Is it free of WebDav for SharePoint or uses WebDav for some operations? It seems that SharePoint supports Graph and WebDav.

One of the tools was taking longer time (from 0.2 s to 0.5 to 0.8s) on expanding folders, listing files, rclone (and another commercial tool) was always fast.

One of the tools claims that expanding directories (retrieving them) is slow due to Microsoft Graph limitations. Another tool tool (fast as rclone on this well) seems to use WebDav for part of the job but I haven't seen all their requests.

I should even check on rclone debug logs if rclone is fast on expanding directories because of pre-loading.

Thanks for reading the praise / question about how rclone uses SharePoint protocol.