how do I tell my system to preemptively index and generate thumbnails or whatever the fuck it needs to do so I can browse this remote share without massive lag every time I enter a new directory
Discussion
Switch from samba to NFS. NFS performance is better.
For media I mostly use Kodi to scrape my content. All the movies and TV shows need to be named correctly. Which they should be anyways.
I also have jelly fin pointed at my media for viewing stuff in cell phones.
So between jellyfin and kids I rarely need to view the content manually
And it's already cached on the clients.