Insync-nautilus makes opening folders with many files very slow

#1

Hi there!

The short version:

The insync implementation of insync-nautilus causes extremely long waits when opening folders with lots of files. This does not happen with Dropbox.

The long version:
I was struggling with >1 minute waits to open a folder with ~15K csv files, and thought it was related to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/869793 and/or https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/nautilus/-/issues/978.

But after some testing I realized when I opened the same folder with insync closed, the time went down to a couple seconds. I thought it could be the icon badges (green ticks) insync shows, so I tried uninstalling insync-nautilus and leaving insync open, and the wait time remained a couple seconds.

Then, I copied the same folder to Dropbox (it also shows badges). But the issue did not happen there. It seems the Dropbox implementation is different, as it starts showing the badges after the files are shown.

I hope you can take a look.

Cheers

#2

I can confirm this happens. The same thing happens with Dropbox, however I can confirm that whatever Dropbox does is indeed faster. I have folders that I cannot open when InSync is running as they will occasionally freeze Nautilus or cause it to crash.

I would argue however that this is something that would be better fixed in Nautilus. They could simply lazy load the badges from whatever application (in this case InSync) provides them, so that they first load and display the folder contents, and loading the appropriate badges happens in background. If this is however something that can be facilitated by InSync themselves (I suspect it might not be, as it is probably Nautilus that blocks the entire file manager until they have retrieved all badges) then great, but if perhaps one of the InSync developers could confirm that my assumption is correct it may be worth opening a bug/feature request against Nautilus for this instead.

#3

Thanks!

In the tests I run comparing the same folder in Dropbox and insync, as is your case, with insync it was so slow it became either unusable (30s to a couple of minutes wait) or sometimes crashed. But in Dropbox, albeit slower than a plain folder, it was definitely usable.

This led me to believe there is something to be done at the insync level. I can see the dropbox nautilus extension is open source (https://github.com/dropbox/nautilus-dropbox), so hopefully that could make things easier.

#4

I appreciate the insights you’ve both shared, @RobinJ1995 and @Gorka_Navarrete! :slight_smile:

Let me forward this to our Linux team and I will update this thread accordingly!

#5

Update: It is a new issue and is usually caused when a folder has a lot of files and a user is viewing it in the file manager. Our engineer has lined this up to be fixed. No ETA yet, but will update this thread when the fix is available!

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