Nautilus take huge quantity of RAM with thumbnails

[Valentin Crone]

Hello,
When you open a folder containing many pictures/images, nautilus take huge quantity of RAM because it open all thumbnails in same time.

On my laptop, nautilus have take more RAM than my computer have (4GB) for o folder containing 2000 - 4000 images/pictures.

Just for testing, I have linked many images on the same folder (28000), and try to open it with nautilus.
Nautilus take 5GB of RAM per windows/tab in the folder. (So nautilus take 8GB of ram just for that....), and the time used just to display icons (without thumbnail) is very long.

To compare: Windows Explorer (on Windows 7) is very faster than nautilus to open that, and don't take this huge RAM quantity !

Other test: Open the System32 folder on Windows with the explorer, and the System32 folder on Linux with nautilus:
On Windows, it's fast (5 - 10s to open max), with nautilus, it takes 40 - 120s to open it. (and just to open)

It can be a good thing to optimise the time to open folder when it contain many sub-folders or files, try to open /bin, /usr/bin, or /usr/share (or equivalent), if you're not on a SSD it's take 2 - 3min

And for thumbnails: It can be a good think to load the thumbnail when it's displayed, and unload when it's not displayed.
It you have 100 files in the folder, with many pictures, You have 50 pictures displayed in same time, the 50 others can be savec in thumbnail cache, but nautilus must not open it.

For 5000 pictures, you have already 50 pictures displayed at same time, but, if nautilus load the 4950 others, the RAM explode.

Please, add this functionnality to make nautilus thin and faster. Just, after opening 2 windows on my folder (with 28000 small pictures), the computer use 12.4GB of RAM (1.8GB before the test), you understand the problem?

This "bug", affect all versions of Ubuntu.

Thank you :)