ubuntu 10.04 - why is nautilus slow?

I'm wondering why Nautilus is very slow when opening a directory containing lots of files. My /usr/lib dir for example has 1900 files and it takes approximately 5+ seconds to show everything. It has been like this since I installed Ubuntu few months ago and it's really quite annoying sometimes. I don't have powerful hardware but I know that Windows Explorer is so much faster than this.

Is there anything that can be done to speed it up?

Ubuntu 10.04

Answer

Tracing the execution of nautilus shows that the slowness is due to a combination of two factors:

It's smart about displaying useful information about each file. It looks inside the contents of files to determine what icon to use, and possibly show a preview. This can be toned down by turning previews off in the preferences.

It does a lot of useless work (such as stating each file multiple times, and checking /proc/filesystems even for non-directories). All you can do is learn programming, improve the program and send a patch. Or at least send the authors a feature request (please make it faster).

It calls several external processes for each directory, I haven't explored what they do.

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