long thumbnail or access operations freeze gthumb and gnome panel

[dronus]

If a lengthy operation occurs in some place, for example starting gthumb while some mounted device is inaccessible (network share) or the directory shown contains new raw pictures or video files, gthumb freezes for the processing time, and when used with gnome-panel, the window switcher might freeze to after trying to focus the frozen gthumb window.

This is very bad, as it renders the system unresponsive in some kind for non-expert users. Its very ugly things like that still happen today...

What have I done:
-Fill a directory with many video files or for example nikon digital camera raw images
-Open gthumb by clicking one image of that directory

What happend:
-gthumb does not show up for quite some time, then it shows up, but the window is empty, after clicking the title in gnome-panels window switcher, the window switcher doesn't redraw nor react to clicks anymore.

What should happen:
-gthumb should open immediately, show the one picture clicked after some load time, and do the directory indexing in the background without further interference.

[dronus (paul-geisler)]

As it freezes system components, this is a severe issue. Please assign high priority.

[dronus (paul-geisler)]

I also like to mention that this is not tied to swapping by low memory conditions, which would easily exhibit such behaviour. Other applications work like charm, if switched to by alt+tab hotkey, which still works.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.