11.04nautilus
I am on Ubuntu 11.04. And Nautilus is very slow. It opens directories for 3-5 seconds even if a directory contains just a few small files. Even selecting of a file or directory with narrow keys is extremely slow and it rises my CPU usage up to 100%.
It makes it almost unusable.
But I noticed that if I start my nautilus as superuser:
$ gksu nautilus
then it works just fine. It is fast and responsive.
So what can I do to fix this?
Any help is really appreciated.
I figured out some ways to speed up nautilus: bookmarks and previews. But it's still not as fast as it should be ... and I have an SSD!
Bookmarks:
To fix it delete all your bookmarks, restart and then add back the ones you can't live without.
Using strace I realised that nautilus was stating lots of files for every view. Even files that were not in directory I was browsing during the trace. I think nautilus is trying to pre-cache these bookmarks.
I had one network drive as a bookmark ... this might have been the reason why nautilus was taking several seconds to load.
Preview settings:
Disable the previews in the preferences as follows:
I think you sould might install PCManFM (File Manager like Nautilus), it's the default file manager on Lubuntu, it's is "lightning fast" and it's interface looks like Nautilus.
You can install it from the Terminal with:
$ sudo apt-get install pcmanfm
Best Answer
I fould this on http://subbass.blogspot.com/2009/05/is-your-nautilus-slow-to-open.html