Comment 3 for bug 230374

I am browsing by going Places -> Home Folder, then View -> Show Hidden Files and going into the .gvfs directory. From there I can select "gdh on localhost". I rely on ~/.gvfs to work with remote .rar and other large archive files with console / non-GNOME apps, since the 'unrar' console binary obviously has no idea what the "smb://" protocol is.

gvfs-ls is lightning-fast:

gdh@gdh-home:~$ time gvfs-ls sftp://gdh@localhost/home/gdh/huge >/dev/null

real 0m0.876s
user 0m0.104s
sys 0m0.016s

Because gvfs-ls is also able to provide directory listings of local files too, I tried this:

gdh@gdh-home:~$ time gvfs-ls /home/gdh/.gvfs/sftp\ on\ localhost/home/gdh/huge >/dev/null

real 0m7.977s
user 0m0.160s
sys 0m0.068s

So, 10 times slower to access trivial 'filename only' data using gvfs-ls.

I expect that Nautilus is several orders of magnitude slower because of all the extra metadata it will be requesting for each file.

I have tried disabling all the previews in Nautilus so that it doesn't count items in subdirs/generate icons for text-file, and 'Never' display preview for local files, but it's still taking minutes to show the contents of the 'huge' directory in ~/.gvfs/gdh on localhost/home/gdh/huge

It's purely access via gvfs-fuse-daemon that is slow, therefore the question about 'non gvfs fuse mounts' doesn't make much sense. (for completeness, my NTFS partitions via fuseblk run as fast as ext3).