Re: Possible speed enhancement

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Tue, 2008-09-23 at 15:20 +0200, John Bester wrote:

> Nautilus takes about 8 seconds to load up /usr/lib on my current PC
> (about 2,300 files). KDE/dolphin takes about 2 seconds. 

This again... The reason things like /usr/bin and /usr/lib are slow are
that these are large directories where almost no files have an
extension. This means we have to sniff the file type by reading the
first bit of all files. Reading lots of files is inherently slow due to
the mechanical motion required for seeks on a harddrive.

That some other apps choose not to sniff such files makes them faster
for /usr/lib and /usr/bin, but they miss showing file types on some
files. This is a design decision for nautilus, which is not mainly
designed to read /usr/bin, but rather to manage users normal files
(which generally have extensions).