nautilus should indicate when properties are updating

[PGScooter]

Binary package hint: nautilus

ubuntu 9.04 64-bit.

version:1:2.26.2-0ubuntu2

Sometimes I copy folders with many (thousands) of files in them. I do this either by cp, rsync. Often I want to check the progress of the transfer, so I calculate the folder size of the source folder and compare it to the folder size of the target folder. However, when calculating the folder size of the target folder, Nautilus will often report the size from the LAST time I queried it to calculate the folder size (I think that it thinks that the folder hasn't changed). Then, after about 10-20 seconds, it starts calculating the new folder size.

Perhaps this is not a bug and that it is computationally inefficient to check if the folder has changed right away. In this case, I would still like to know that Nautilus has not confirmed if the folder has changed or not. This could be done by the "busy cursor rotating circle thing" or even just a "calculating..." text on the folder properties.

Thank you!

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:

 * Is this reproducible?
 * If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug?

 This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[PGScooter (pgscooter)]

Here is an example:

Run the following script, which will create 10000 files, each with size 100k.

mkdir folder1
for (( c=1; c<=10000; c++ ))
do
        dd if=/dev/zero of=folder1/imaginaryfile$c bs=1024 count=100
done

While the script is running, right-click folder1 in a nautilus browser and go to properties-- nautilus will calculate the current size of the folder. Then, wait two seconds, close the properties window, right-click folder1 again, and go to properties again. The size hangs on the previous size and the number of files reported is the same as the previous query. For me, this delay only lasted 5 seconds before nautilus started calculating the real size. Even after the script was done, I queried the properties and it still delayed 5 seconds. When working with bigger folders, I believe the delay increases.

Note that I am experiencing this on both ext3 and fat32

If this delay is necessary, I think it would be a nice feature just to show that nautilus is delaying, that it is not finished calculating the size and cardinality of the folder, that those property statistics do not reflect the true properties.

Thank you for your help!

[A. Walton (awalton)]

This is very much the intended behavior of Nautilus. Everything is done asynchronously as to not block the UI whenever possible. That means caching data like the complete size of everything in a folder, as this isn't usually a fast-changing piece of data. We register file watches on folders though, and we do reissue requests whenever the data does change, however that information cannot be obtained instantly (however much we wish it could be ;). Not sure about adding anything to the UI to indicate this though. It's likely not going to show sane behavior due to the way Nautilus caches data.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing the bug since that's not really one

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

letting as new for now, does that make sense to you?

[PGScooter (pgscooter)]

ok, thank you for the quick replies and explanations. The intended behaviour of Nautilus, as described by A. Walton, definitely makes sense and I see that it would not be worth the sacrifice to calculate the size instantaneously, especially since, as mentioned, the size does not usually change that much.

However, I still think that it would be nice to see some sort of indication that Nautilus has recognized that the folder has changed, but has not yet calculated it's new size. From what I understand, Nautilus does recognize that it has changed, right? Because there would have been a change to the folder that would have been registered. I guess this is now a feature request. Let me know if there is a better place for it.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

there is already some bug open about indication that it's still calculating not sure about the number now though

[Sense Egbert Hofstede (sense)]

I've found a very similar report upstream and posted a comment there telling them about the suggestion.

I'm setting the status to Triaged because we've handled this bug now and the status to Wishlist because it's more an enhancement request than a regression report.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue is fixed with nautilus 3.6 in raring