[Digikam-users] Sluggish use experience with external server and wifi?

[Take]

Hello,

I've been searching for proper photo manager for quite a while and now
I'm giving digikam a chance to suit our family needs with photographs.
So far it seems to have the features I need, most important one being
ability to access photos from multiple computers and accounts.

I've set up an debian server with samba and mysql and connected my
workstation on the same LAN to server via digikam, which works just
fine. I copied most of our photos (~150GB if that matters) to
samba-share, ran mainteance tools from digikam and it rans somewhat
smoothly. Digikam itself tends to be a bit unstable, specially if you
mess around with tags when some mainteance is running.

However the real issue I've encountered is with my laptop. I'ts running
similar setup than my workstation, but it's connected to LAN over wifi.
Usage experience varies between satisfactory and total crap. Quite often
(once per minute or so) digikam just freezes for no apparent reason and
after a while it's again smooth sailing for a while until next freeze
occurs.

I tried to trace the problem to network (which would be the obvious
part) but there's little going on over wifi. Obviously it takes a while
to download thumbnails when I change to different tag/album, but the
problem is (for example) when I try to assign tags to "unknown people"
photos. Occasionally it takes around 30 seconds to get an photo
activated and after that a while to actually place the tag. During the
freeze UI is unresponsive, but some commands go trough, so I need to pay
attention about where to click to avoid unexpected things after UI
responds again.

As mentioned, there's little traffic on network, according to top
there's no processes on wait-state and everything else beyond digikam
works flawlessly. I even suspected that the mysql would be slow for some
reason, but there's no sign of that and even if it was the sql-server
I'd suppose that symptoms would appear on my workstation as well.

My workstation is running Debian Weezy and laptop has Jessie, both have
digikam from debian repository. Laptop is an thinkpad x301, so there
isn't (shouldn't be) any issues with funky wifi-drivers/firmware and as
mentioned everything else on the laptop works smoothly.

So, does anyone have any suggestions on how to fix/improve the current
situation, or even ideas about how to track down the problem more
accurately?

-- 
Take