[Thunar-dev] Slow media

[Benedikt Meurer]

Wit Wilinski wrote:
>>> While testing some volume manager related stuff, I tried to load
>>> a large folder from a CD-ROM (the i386 folder from one of my more
>>> or less unused Windows 2000 install CDs, which contains about
>>> 4000 files) into the tree view and it took forever, even after
>>> the folder content was visible (I suspect this is GtkTreeView
>>> loading icon data for the invisible items, tho haven't checked
>>> yet). And of course, since currently everything runs in the main
>>> thread, the GUI was blocked.
>> 
>> Ok, just checked with other file managers (Nautilus, ROX, Xffm),
>> and this directory is not fun to load with any of them either. The
>> problem is that the file extensions are b0rked (name.xx_) and so
>> the MIME code has to open every single file, just to realize that
>> it's only "garbage" (application/octect-stream).
> 
> I have even a worse example: try to open /usr/bin in gtk+ file open
> dialog -- this one takes ages. Comparing to kde file open dialog =
> tragedy. Kde implemented lazy loading, and gui is still accessible
> while loading items

This is less of a problem, as those folders can be loaded in a short
amount of time, even from cold cache, simply because they are located on
a (fast) harddisk, rather than a slow CD-ROM.

The major problem with /usr/bin or /usr/local/bin is that the MIME code
has to open, read, close nearly every file, because the filenames
usually don't contain any known suffixes.

Benedikt