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starnix
Guru
Joined: 02 Mar 2003
Posts: 530
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 Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 4:37 pm Post subject: Nautilus is a hog |
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| Today I tried to do a file copy from one hard drive to another. I have 2000+ mp3's that I was copying and nautilus made my entire desktop unusable until I killed the copy (killall -9 nautilus). The Load averages in top were 5.76 5.20 2.74. Is there something I can do to make nautilus not completely bog the system while it is working? |
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tomchuk
Guru
Joined: 23 Mar 2003
Posts: 317
Location: Brooklyn, NY
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 7:48 pm Post subject: |
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Nautilus does not deal well with large amounts of files. I've got 4 folders in my home directory and from the time I type nautilus on the command line to when my home dir is displayed (list view) is about 8 seconds. It takes about 23 seconds to show /usr/bin. You either have to accept that nautilus is only suitable for light file browsing or switch to rox or the command line.
For big moves (like 2000 mp3s) nothing beats mv. If you really need a graphical file browser give Velocity or Rox a shot. They're both gtk+2, and both way faster than Nautilus.
nautilus --no-desktop /usr/bin 23 - 25 seconds to show all files and finish loading. Uses 24MB of memory immediatley after loading.
velocity /usr/bin 2 seconds to show all the files, 11 seconds to finish loading. Uses 78MB of memory immediatley after loading.
rox /usr/bin <1 second to show all the files, 8 seconds to finish loading. Uses 13MB of memory immediatley after loading.
There is a velocity ebuild at breakmygentoo.net, rox is available in portage.
Velocity is basically a very light-weight nautilus. The interface is very similar and it understands gnome-vfs locations like preferences:/// or start-here:/// which is nice. It's very fast if you've got a lot of memory, if you don't it will be slower than Nautilus. It isn't under very active development, with version 0.1 released quite some time ago, and it appears that their sourceforge site isn't maintained at all. With a little work to get memory useage down this could be a Nautilus-killer, but that doesn't look likely.
Velocity Screenshot
I never really enjoyed using ROX untill I finally took the time to set it up right. It does take a few minutes in the options dialog to get everything working the way you like it. You may want to add the followin to /etc/profile:
| Code: | | export CHOICESPATH=${HOME}/.Choices:/usr/share/Choices |
...or you'll end up with a big ugly "Choices" directory in your home directory (bugs the hell out of me).
Rox takes a little more setup as it doesn't really use your gnome2 icon theme. You'll have to set icons to use for different mimetypes by right-clicking the icon and choosing 'Dir 'foo'' > 'set icon'. Drag an icon from /usr/share/icons in another Rox window and make sure it applies to all files with the same mimetype instead of just for that file. After you've got stuff like your folder icons set up, the most common mimetype icons set up, and your run actions (which apps handle which mimetypes) set. ROX is a blast to use. It can automatically resize the window and icon sizes when you change folders depending on how much stuff is in the current folder. One of my favorite things about ROX is the tab completion. If you type '/' a GoTo bar comes up at the bottom where you can navigate by typing the path using tab-completion (like bash).
ROX Screenshot
Anyway, this turned to be more of an alternate file manager review than a "yeah Nautilus is a hog, use ROX" post as I originally intended it to be. |
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neuron
Advocate
Joined: 28 May 2002
Posts: 2371
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 8:42 pm Post subject: |
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couldn't someone put up a nice rox-gnomeicons ebuild or something?
/me 'd love that.
too lazy to do it myself  |
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tomchuk
Guru
Joined: 23 Mar 2003
Posts: 317
Location: Brooklyn, NY
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| Posted: Wed Dec 03, 2003 9:13 pm Post subject: |
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| You can find links to tons of ROX icon themes here |
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