Comment 2 for bug 1531650

Yup, while mediascanner2 is scanning the app is unusable :-/

This bug is probably a duplicate of bug 1529991 (qmlscene crashes if music app is started while mediascanner is extracting) and linked to others about high CPU (bug 1442035, bug 1237065).

It took 1 hour and 40 minutes for mediascanner2 to complete its scan on my laptop [0], rendering the laptop useless due to the disk activity. Upon analysis I could see the sqlite lock file appearing as it adds every individual file to the store, which suggests it might be doing a commit as each track/video/picture is added, if this is the case could it not batch these into groups?

However, while scanning it would be better not to crash/be in a bad state. So could the mediascanner always give a valid model to the music-app, and if it doesn't exist already, is there a property to tell us when mediascanner is scanning? As we could show up a notification while this is occurring, to at least alert the user of what is happening?

This tends not to happen too often on the device, as by the time you have transferred files to it via MTP mediascanner has scanned. But in the case of the desktop where you can already have the media there or when a SD card is plugged into the device, this appears to occur quite often.

For reference Rhythmbox took around 2-3 minutes to scan the same data and didn't cause high disk usage, still allowing me to use the laptop.

0 - I have ~3600 audio files (~60GB), 10,600 photos (~7GB), ~180 videos (~30GB).