Storage page takes about 6secs to open

[Szymon Waliczek]

Version: Ubuntu 14.10 r17

Reproduce:
- open settings app
- scroll down and click on "About this phone"
- click on "Storage"

Result:
UI gets frozen for about 6sec before "Storage" page appears on the screen.

Expectation:
"Storage" page to open instantly.

<https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutThisDevice#storage>:
“While all the sizes are being calculated:
 * the chart should be an indeterminate progress bar, exactly the same width and height as the eventual chart;
 * the value for ‘Free space’ should be ‘Calculating…’;
 * the value for all the other categories should be ‘…’ (to minimize repetition);
 * the list of apps+scopes should not be present at all.”

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks, indeed that page could be optimized. What device are you using?

[Szymon Waliczek (majster-pl)]

Currently I'm using bq aquaris e4.5 however it is the same on nexus 4.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

The UI freezing for any slow-loading screen is bug 1239884.

[Femma (femma)]

This isn't a UX issue but a performance issue, the expected UX behaviour is for storage to load within half a second!

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

Ken please confirm if this is still an issue

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Reproduced on Ubuntu 15.04 r91 on an Aquaris E4.5. Immediately after restarting the phone, in five trials, opening the "Storage" screen took 11 seconds, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, 10 seconds, and 10 seconds.

If two seconds with nothing changing on-screen is long enough for you to start worrying whether something is wrong, then the "worry duration" here is 10 seconds – 2 seconds = 8 seconds. For a GUI, that's extremely long.

Fixing bug 1488005 would greatly lessen this bug, as well as most other responsiveness problems in System Settings. In this case it would halve the worry duration: 10 seconds – 2 seconds of highlighting the "Storage" item – 2 seconds showing a skeleton screen – the first 2 seconds that the spinner was visible = 4 seconds. So I strongly encourage fixing that bug.

But a worry duration of 4 seconds is still 4 seconds too long, and that can't be eliminated by designer fiat. Calculating storage usage, on current filesystems, is one of those things that just takes a long time. Other systems deal with this by having custom placeholders on their equivalent screens during the calculation.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ddb2NVd8G-g#t=23s - iOS
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LUfFIJ-BDs0#t=27s - Android
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7PTBC525udQ#t=45s - Windows Phone
Unless there's some magic we can perform that those other systems can't, we'll need to do the same.

[Bill Filler (bfiller)]

@jgdx
We should do a few things to make this better:
1) display the page immediately and perform whatever necessary operations for the calculations async
2) display results as they come in on the page, showing spinner (or whatever spec'd by design) until the page is fully loaded

[Gregory Opera (gregoryopera)]

Approximately fifteen (15) seconds to load on my bq Aquaris E5 HD Ubuntu Edition here, with a 32GB storage card inserted.
* OS build number: OTA-9
* Ubuntu Image part: 20160123.1
* Ubuntu build description: Ubuntu 15.04 - armhf (20160123-115651)
* Device Image part: 20160108-efc96d8
* Device build description: VEGETA01A-S23A_BQ_L100EN_2009_160123
* Customization Image part: 20160111-926-36--vivid

[Richard Somlói (ricsipontaz)]

Bq Aquaris E4.5 - with OTA-9.1
It takes about 15 seconds to open it.

[Robin Heroldich (robinheroldich)]

Same here, it's really really slow.

[Matthew Paul Thomas (mpt)]

Specification updated. <https://wiki.ubuntu.com/AboutThisDevice?action=diff&rev2=36&rev1=35>

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

This bug was fixed in the package ubuntu-system-settings - 0.3+16.04.20160330-0ubuntu1

---------------
ubuntu-system-settings (0.3+16.04.20160330-0ubuntu1) xenial; urgency=medium

  [ Jin Hsieh ]
  * Bug fixed - Settings/Storage shows we have only 2.3GB total storage

  [ Ken VanDine ]
  * Use a loader for the Storage page and show an ActivityIndicator
    until the page is ready Improved performance of building the list of
    mountedVolumes (LP: #1422206)

 -- Ken VanDine <email address hidden> Wed, 30 Mar 2016 17:43:55 +0000

[Victor gonzalez (victor-gonzalez-0)]

Storage still takes 6 secs to open Krillin rc350