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Idea #1521: Speed-up Nautilus

Written by zaryk the 29 Feb 08 at 15:57. Category: System. Related project: Nothing/Others. Status: New
Rationale
Nautilus is curently very slow especially when opening folders containing many files and sub-folders.

It takes 10 seconds for example to display /usr/bin directory with Athlon XP 2500+ CPU and 512 MB RAM machine. Thunar does the action with no lag on the same configuration.
Tags: nautilus

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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #1521
Written by zaryk the 29 Feb 08 at 15:57.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #1521 was submitted before this update, its rationale and solution are not separated. Please vote accordingly, and if you have the necessary rights, please separate the rationale from the solution. Thanks!

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omidmottaghi wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 17:51
There are some improvements in 2.22 version of Gnome, but it is not enoght

omidmottaghi wrote on the 29 Feb 08 at 17:51
There are some improvements in 2.22 version of Gnome, but it is not enough

zarkov wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 06:48
Hell, yes. I can only speak for my own, less than state of the art system, but once a folder has some thousand files in it, performance gets abysmally slow.

ketilwaa wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 16:12
I've sat around for a minute waiting for /usr/bin to load quite some time... Geez... +1 from me!

rawsausage wrote on the 1 Mar 08 at 21:24
Took 10 seconds or so for me. What happens there is that Nautilus probes many of the files to determine their actual file types and more accurate information, it doesn't entirely blindly believe everything.

galv wrote on the 7 Mar 08 at 23:48
No offense, but Nautilus sucks - it is very slow!!
That is why I use Thunar!

SniperGX1 wrote on the 22 Mar 08 at 08:11
Didn't see the value of this till today. Plugged in a 300Gig external drive loaded with goodies I needed and OMG was it slow to show folders. Please fix.

motumboe wrote on the 26 Mar 08 at 07:26
Yes I agree!
Yesterday I opened a folder with 1200 pictures. The thumbnails took years to generate. And at the end, memory required by nautilus was 232Megs!!

ethana2 wrote on the 26 Mar 08 at 22:37
I don't know if this is helpful as far as actually finding the right solution to the issue, but it would be very nice, so +1

LostOverThere wrote on the 6 Apr 08 at 00:11
+1

Actually, I feel like creating 10 accounts and voting this idea up 10 times. This needs to be done. Nautilus is a slug!

erlend wrote on the 12 Apr 08 at 12:08
I find the thumbnail generation on Nautilus hopelessly slow. If you insert a camera card full of photos and view it with Nautilus it takes about 2 seconds per thumbnail (on a brand new computer).

Thunar can generate these thumbnails instantly, because it uses the thumbnails put in the Exif tags of the jpeg by the digital camera. Nautilus should do the same.

Perhaps thunar should replace nautilus as the default file manager - it is more modern, plugable, and faster. It also follows all the freedesktop.org standards.

linkdesink wrote on the 7 Jun 08 at 02:09
I agree nautilus is very slow and eats very much memory.Replace the ubuntu default manager in version 8.10.

elias1884 wrote on the 9 Jul 08 at 12:22
Nautilus is the worst of all file managers when it comes to speed! It is even slower than - I hate to say this - it is even slower than freaking Windows Explorer. It is even slower than Windows Explorer as a VMware guest on Linux connecting to a CIFS folder on Samba!

So concluding, it is crap!

loonyphoenix wrote on the 21 Aug 08 at 11:34
I so agree with you all. Nautilus is arguably the most important program in GNOME.

tmahmood wrote on the 21 Aug 08 at 15:52
Nautilus needs speed improvement, Took 20+ secs to load /usr/bin with 2200 files in AMD64 3200+ machine, in many other cases I find it very slow ...

hardyheron wrote on the 16 Oct 08 at 08:56
Nautilus must die!
We really need something else !

scientus wrote on the 19 Oct 08 at 19:08
your descripption makes it seem decent. only trying to view a samba folder nautilus used 50% cpu and 250 mb ram and takes about 60+ seconds, SERIOUSLY nautilus sucks, and it acts like a virus and restarts itsself when you kill it cause its killing your computer, the only way to get rid of the ************ app is to rename the executable, IT ****ING SUCKS. IT SUCKS REALLY BAD, IT NEEDS TO BURN IN ****. seriously i like linux but windows is WAYYYYYYYYY faster than this nautilus ********.
2400+ Athalon 1GB ram

gaspard.leon wrote on the 24 Oct 08 at 03:45
well I'm not going to go so far as to say nautilus sucks, because it does have some redeeming features...

However it is quite slow:

1. Slow with large number of files.
2. Thumbnailers are slow, the worst being large thumbnail mode causing regen every time (no caching)
3. "Jumpy" refresh as the files are updated and sorted in real time, I suggest resorting in clumps, so it's not so jumpy.
4. No metadata support, just try opening a photo or music folder, you can't add columns for any useful attributes.
5. Tabs (fixed in the new version yea!!)
6. Slow redraw of window (problem with most GTK apps)
7. No obvious way to access "Computer" without going back to the main menu
8. Can't use "up" button to go up to SMB server share list from a root SMB share

Good things:

1. Seamless mounting of FTP and SMB shares, so you can access most types of files as if they were local
2. Scripting support so you can make your own right-click options
3. Working trash can
4. While slow, it actually does thumbnail most files, with large thumbnail support.
5. IT WORKS, and doesn't crash much

;)
just my 2 cents

skymuss wrote on the 30 Nov 08 at 16:47
I have often worked with the nautilus
FTP protocol and I recognized that the speed
is very slow, if you compare nautilus with other
ftp clients like filezilla.

skymuss

quirks wrote on the 13 Dec 08 at 00:00
A thousand times yes!

I reverted to using a terminal when accesing directories with a large number of files. And this is very sad! Am apllication as central to the desktop as Nautilus must be fixed with high priority!

I know nothing about the source of Nautilus, but I assume, that it determines the file types of all files in the folder when opened, although it would be perfectly sufficient to identify only those currently visible (probably only one or two dozens). I should not be all too hard to fix this.

brettalton wrote on the 15 Dec 08 at 05:23
Has been taking over two minutes for me and Nautilus is currently frozen...

P4 640 / 2GB 4-4-4-12 DDR2 RAM / nVidia GeForce 6800 / WD 250GB 16MB Cache

That's pretty bad...

cmaj wrote on the 27 Dec 08 at 21:52
I love Ubunutu, I like Nautilus but, please fix this!!!!

:-)

krogulec66 wrote on the 30 Dec 08 at 22:20
I don't think the sluggishness of Nautilus is Nautilus-specific. It looks more of a Debian thing. I remember it being slow with Debian Etch, it is (tolerably) slow on my desktop machines running Ubuntu and IT IS ABYSMALLY SLOW ON MY MSI PR601 LAPTOP. It takes 2 minutes to open a folder containing some 3000 of mostly small files. I run Fedora 10 on the same laptop - Nautilus opens the same folder almost instantaneously (with the same tracker options on). I've just tested Zenwalk and Sabayon - it doesn't seem to be a problem with these distros either.
Happy New Year
J.


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