nautilus search is horribly slow

Bug #96483 reported by Joachim Noreiko
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
nautilus (Ubuntu)
Invalid
Low
Ubuntu Desktop Bugs

Bug Description

Binary package hint: nautilus

I've started a search for 'jpg' in my home folder.
The same search with the 'search for files' tool came up with results pretty quickly.
It's now been about 5 minutes, and there is still hard disk activity and a busy mouse pointer in the window, but no results.
On the offchance this was due to the file extension not being searched, I've also tried words I know are used in the names of some of my files.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Thank you for your bug. That's probably because you have lot of datas and hard disks are quite slow devices. The gnome-search-tool uses the updatedb database (same as "locate" from a command line), the database can easily be outdated though. Closing, that's not really a bug

Changed in nautilus:
assignee: nobody → desktop-bugs
importance: Undecided → Low
status: Unconfirmed → Rejected
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Joachim Noreiko (jnoreiko) wrote :

After 15 minutes I still had no results.
There is really a problem here -- searching a hard drive shouldn't be that slow. It should at least produce SOME results -- I have jpg files on my desktop and it surely would have found those early on.

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Joachim Noreiko (jnoreiko) wrote :

How long should I expect to wait for search to produce results?
I have an Athlon 3000+ with 1GB of memory.

Please reopen this.

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Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

the CPU speed and the memory doesn't change a lot, the search look on the disk, how many datas do you have?

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Joachim Noreiko (jnoreiko) wrote :

In my home folder, or in total?
Where does the search begin looking?
Shouldn't it produce some sort of result as soon as it finds something?

Windows 2000, searching the same hard drive (minus the ext2/3 partitions, but still most of it), starts to produce results after about 20 seconds.

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Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

wherever you are using the search. Using the search might list items after 1 second, it depends of the order it looks though directories. Does using the search in a directory with 10 items work correctly?

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Joachim Noreiko (jnoreiko) wrote :

Ok.
I have my ~/Pictures folder open. It contains about 6 images, and a subfolder Backgrounds which contains two images.
I hit CTRL-F from this folder, and type a word that I can see is contained in one of the image filenames.

After 5 minutes I got results, but these are from ALL of my home folder, not the current folder.

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Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

Do you use the special or the browser mode? Are you sure you selected that directory for the search? Do you have beagle installed?

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Joachim Noreiko (jnoreiko) wrote :

I use spatial mode.
What do you mean by 'selected'?
I am in the folder I want to search when I do Ctrl-F.
I don't know about beagle.

Revision history for this message
Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

when you do ctrl-F on spatial mode the default location is your user directory, not the one opened, bug #28537, does it work better when you select the directory you want to use?

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Joachim Noreiko (jnoreiko) wrote :

Yes, when I select the folder I want in the search window drop-down, it's very quick.

Thanks for your help :)

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Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote :

no problem, letting the bug closed then, the directory selection already has a bug open

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bryancole (bryan-cole) wrote :

There is a real problem here. One two machines, one with beagle installed and the other with tracker, the beagle-search-tool and tracker-search-tool respectively return their results on a word (my surname say) in no more than one or two seconds, returning ~70 odd documents. If I do <ctrl>F and attempt to search using the integrated search in nautilus (which uses beagle or tracker depending on what's installed) it takes *much* longer (many minutes instead of a few seconds). It's true that limiting the search to a smaller section of the filesystem improves the search speed but why should nautilus search be *so* much slower than beagle-search or tracker-serach?

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bryancole (bryan-cole) wrote :

OK, I need to moderate my previous comment. It looks like nautilus is not using tracker even when it is installed (and where beagle is not installed) and is simply performing an unindexed search on filename (this explains the slow speed). I need to check this on the machine with beagle.

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