Nautilus instability and SMB slowness

[Federico Mena Quintero <federico ximian com>]

Hi,

Recently I've been working on two things:

1. Customers report that Nautilus is especially unstable when browsing
SMB shares (and especially pre-2.16).

2. Customers report that Nautilus can get really slow while browsing SMB
shares.

While looking for the causes for (1) I added a patch to get logging
information [1].  Alex Larsson fixed a bunch of bugs more or less
simultaneously, so the logging hasn't been terribly useful so far - but
the hope is that it will become more useful in the future, as we add
more logging points.  With Alex's patches, at least one of our customers
is a lot happier about the stability.

Still, the logging patch may be useful to other distros.  I'd especially
like to know if people are willing to introduce new logging points as
they look for bugs.

For (2) I'm working on figuring out exactly what's going on.  The main
culprit is that libsmbclient cannot be called simultaneously from
multiple threads, so all SMB calls are serialized [2].  I just found a
minor stupidity in the way Nautilus calls gnome-vfs-daemon; I have a
patch for that.

How much resources are distros investing in fixing or tracking down
Nautilus bugs?  Like any file manager, it gets a ton of abuse :)

[1]
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2006-10.html#nautilus-logging
- I'll post a newer patch to nautilus-list this week.

[2]
http://primates.ximian.com/~federico/news-2006-11.html#is-local-roundtrips

  Federico