Re: The more mounts I add, the slower Nautilus becomes.

["Chris Fanning" <christopher fanning gmail com>]

On Sun, Jun 15, 2008 at 12:54 AM, Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org> wrote:
> Am Donnerstag, den 12.06.2008, 15:28 +0200 schrieb Chris Fanning:
>> I've got some samba shares mounted in my home directory.
>> /home/user/shares/mountpoint(s)
>> When I open Nautilus I've noticed that there is network activity
>> between my desktop and the samba server(s).
>> It happens all the time (not just when I'm opening the mointpoints).
>> Just simply opening Nautilus at my home directory creates network
>> traffic to all samba servers.
>>
>> This makes Nautilus slow down. One of the samba servers is at a remote
>> site so traffic on the WAN is even slower.
>> The more mounts I add, the slower Nautilus becomes.
>>
>> What can I do?
>
> There are two aspects:
>
Hi,
please forgive me if I blunder here.

> A) Nautilus will try to list get the number of items in the mount
> point's root directory, even if you are not displaying it. This is a
> feature.
>
I am trying to imagine the benefits of examining ./shares/mount1 while
opening /home/user/directory, why is it a feature?
I've also noticed that any gnome app will provoke the same with the Open Dialog.

> Currently, the internal priority for this process is equal to the
> priority of the I/O tasks for getting basic file metadata. Maybe the I/O
> priorities could be optimized for optimal display speed on scenarios
> where subfolders are used.
>
> B) You are using FUSE, or kernel mounts. However, for optimal
> integration you should use GVFS mounts. Unfortunately, permanent mounts
> for remote shares are not yet available in GVFS (Christian Kellner is
> working on it, though), so this is not an option yet - unless you add a
> startup script that executes a set of gvfs-mount commands.
>
I haven't started using gfvs yet. But (please correct me if I'm
wrong), gvfs is going to let me access these shares like kde does,
"smb://server/share".
99% of the documents on the samba servers are ODF. From experience
with KDE, at least until very recently, OpenOffice cannot open/save
files to a folder opened in this manner. It reports I/O errors. We
avoid this by mounting and umounting user shares on login/logout with
pam-scripts.
Are you suggesting that this directory scanning will not happen if we
continue to mount at login but upgrade to gvfs?

Just a thought. Perhaps an gconf option could be added to nautilus
something like --exclude-other-filesystems sometime in the future.

best regards.
Chris.

> best regards,
>  Christian Neumair
>
> --
> Christian Neumair <cneumair gnome org>
>
>