Forticlient and Google Drive Desktop App on M1 Mac

I use the Google Drive desktop app to manage files stored on Google Drive via the finder on both of my MacBook Pro M1 Pros. On my personal laptop (16") there are no issues. However, on my work-issued 14" syncing via the desktop app is painfully slow. I am pretty certain that the culprit is the Forticlient app that I am compelled to run which serves not only as our VPN client but also our antivirus software. I have paused and restarted syncing, deleted and reinstalled the app, and even convinced our IT people to add the recommended file exceptions for me all of which have not worked. Wondering if anyone has thoughts on other things I might try to get this going again. This problem does not exist on my personal machine which is not running Forticlient.

No idea about Forticlient sorry. Have you told Google Drive to keep all of your files locally? That might make it vaguely more usable.

Considering I have like 12 TB of files stored on Google Drive storing them locally is not really an option (I have years worth of data files including videos stored there since I have unlimited storage).

In a previous life as a bit-herder, I’d sometimes run into issues with TLS/SSL traffic not working (or being very slow) through VPN tunnels. The issue was that the VPN encapsulation would cause packets to exceed the MTU and the DF (no not fragment) bit was also set. I don’t know if that’s your issue, but every time I see a problem that involves a combination of VPN, large packet traffic, and extreme slowness (or outright failure), that’s where I start looking.