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Idea #17080: Show a status-bar in nautilus when loading contents of a large folder

Written by kramer65 the 6 Jan 09 at 16:33. Related project: Nautilus. Status: New
Rationale
I often have to load folders which contain a lot of pictures or music. This always takes some time which is very annoying.

It would be nice to see some kind of status bar which shows how far nautilus is in reading the contents of the folder.
Tags: (none)

236
votes
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Solution #1: Auto-generated solution of idea #17080
Written by kramer65 the 6 Jan 09 at 16:33.
Ubuntu Brainstorm was updated in January 2009. Since the idea #17080 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!
186
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Solution #2: Show file list quickly - then start metadata retrieval process
Written by marvo the 14 Jan 09 at 11:44.
A status bar is just prettyfying the symptoms of a bad design.
Nautilus ought to display the sorted file list immediately (in fractions of a second) and then start to build the thumbnails and retrieve the meta information.
43
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Solution #3: Show files that will fit in Nautilus window quickly
Written by Lex the 15 Jan 09 at 20:27.
It is important to show files that will fit on the screen quickly.
1) first files fit in the Natilus window without metadata
2) load up metadata for files
3) load rest without metadata (starting with files near "view")
4) load metadata for rest
-23
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Solution #4: Thumbnail large folders automatically
Written by Shane Fagan the 19 Jan 09 at 22:42.
Create a small thumbnail containing a file list and sizes of the files. This would be done when a folder becomes bigger than like 100mb.

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Comments
ushimitsudoki wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 16:45
+1

Nautilus becomes unusable when directories start getting several thousand files.

Anyway, maybe the status bar would help in this.

Hymyly wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 18:58
It would be better if it could show the contents as it goes along, like Windows Explorer in Vista and the Mac OS X browser both do, but a status bar is certainly a start.

marvo wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 19:32
-1 because a status bar is just prettyfying the symptoms of a bad design. Nautilus should display the sorted file list immediately (in fractions of a second) and then start to build the thumbnails and retrieve the meta information.

wleoncio wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 19:48
I've never seen how OSX handles it, but I really like that oozy green bar on Vista's Windows Explorer. marvo's got a point, a good file manager should rarely need such a feature (Win Exp does it all the time), but I believe Nautilus should have this feature anyway, because we can never be sure when it's going to have to face a folder too big for the CPU to handle.

graingert wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 21:09
it's not the cpu, it's the drive that's slow

wleoncio wrote on the 6 Jan 09 at 23:33
You mean, because of ext3 or is it really Nautilus' fault?

Eldmannen wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 00:59
Better goto the root of the problem.
Solve the real problem.
Make Nautilus faster.

kramer65 wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 10:30
I totally agree that the solution would be to make nautilus faster, but then why make a splash screen? Why not just make ubuntu boot within a couple seconds so that the splash screen is not needed anymore?

Although I am not a programmer I guess an easier to implement feature for now would be the statusbar which is why I suggested it..

One last note. When I was on ubuntu 6.06, and 7.10 I never had problems with the size of these folders. The problem only appeared when I got to 8.04...



braaivleis wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 10:48
+1

Even if a immediate list of files is displayed one would still like to know when ALL the files will be displayed and give an idea of how long it will take.

Also making nautilus faster will be great but it will hit a situation where the amount of files it needs to display will be too great and cause the user to wait without progress.

The progress/status will be very useful when displaying a list of files over a network (where the bottle neck isn't nautilus.)





ccompagnon wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 12:33
+1 indeed display only the first file doesn't solve the problem, it make it worse if you're finding a file that's not displayed on start.
It will be nice to have a file browser faster, I think the bar is a good start to make the slowness of nautilus evident.

edm1 wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 14:38
Do other file managers perform better on ext3? Im wondering whether it is an underlying problem brought about by a substandard filesystem.

braaivleis wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 14:51
I don't think so ... if you do a "ls" command in the terminal it lists the files pretty quickly.

If you pipe the ls output to a file, its almost instant.

I think the performance bottle neck is in nautilus.

sayakb (Brainstorm admin) wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 15:09
"Do other file managers perform better on ext3? Im wondering whether it is an underlying problem brought about by a substandard filesystem."

On a 1 yr old laptop with config: T7700, 3GB DDR2 RAM, 320GB SATA-II HDD and a 512MB GPU, dolphin works faster (much faster rather) while opening my music folder which has exactly 834 folders.

A first look at the comment from braaivleis would make me think "ls simply lists them. Nautilus or any GUI file manager would show the previews and stuff", but all what I have is folders in my music folder. And anyway, dolphin is faster on my laptop(s) than nautilus.

Also, dolphin shows "Loading folder" bar below as the idea proposes.

+1

ushimitsudoki wrote on the 7 Jan 09 at 15:29
I think people have a different idea of what a *LOT* of files in one directory is...for example, I have one directory containing 60,676 files. You do *NOT* want to open that with Nautilus (or Thunar for that matter)

Things works just fine from the CLI there, though - maybe a half second delay for ls to start producing output. It's not a problem with the filesystem/CPU/disk.

andruk (Idea reviewer) wrote on the 8 Jan 09 at 06:45
Agreed with Eldmannen: Optimize/enhance Nautilus instead of working around a known problem.

Honestly, why didn't the Nautilus devs do this to begin with?

+1

Seph_VII wrote on the 11 Jan 09 at 21:39
Why not do both? Even though I have a lightning-fast internet connection, I still appreciate Firefox having a progress bar.

lukaschmela wrote on the 17 Jan 09 at 19:44
Nautilus is really very slow when opening a directory containing many items, so this should be improved by first. Also working progess like in the solution #3 should be used - load directory's content subsequently.

However, whole process' speed may be also affected by other factors like the device's speed. It is even more appreciable when loading content of a remote directory, e.g. from an FTP server and everything you can see then, is cursor, saing there's some progress in the background. But there may be also a status bar, saing in which state the progress is and the content should be updated in more steps subsequently, if it's needed. Not just print whole directory's content at once after a long time, when it's ready.


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