nautilus has to build search index for the first search, doesn't warn user what's happening

[Reuben Firmin]

My downloads directory has 1177 files in it. With nautilus opened on Downloads, I press ctrl F, and type any word. Initial search takes 10+ seconds (presumably to build the index?) Subsequent searches are fast enough to be useful.

The initial time is a problem, because nautilus does not report to the user what it's doing. Most non technical users will give up, and close the window, believing that "nautilus search is slow", and probably won't reuse search.

Multiple approaches to fixing this could be taken; e.g. background build of indices, or just better user messaging ("Because this is the first time you've used search, we need to create an index. Your future searches will be fast.")

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 11.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.2.1-0ubuntu3.1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.0.0-14.23-generic-pae 3.0.9
Uname: Linux 3.0.0-14-generic-pae i686
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 1.23-0ubuntu4
Architecture: i386
Date: Mon Jan 16 08:19:36 2012
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release i386 (20110427.1)
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to oneiric on 2011-10-15 (92 days ago)

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report but there is no index, nautilus just go through the files and read the disk, it means that your disk is quite slow, the second run is faster because the datas have just been loaded and are still available, searches in other directory or later in the same directory could be slow again though

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Then there is a bug. My disk gets 96.5MB average read, according to the Benchmark utility.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

it's not a bug, it's at best a wishlist about handling searches in a better way than having to go through the disk (which is a known issue), going through the filesystem is going to be slow, especially on rotational disks

[Reuben Firmin (reubenf)]

Sorry, I really think this is a bug.

Searching 1177 titles should take less than 1 second, even reading them off disk. It's not wishlist to say that 10+ seconds is too slow.

ls can read the directory contents in 0.033s. If you're telling me that it waits to display items until it has also scanned all of their contents, then that's also a bug. It should display results as it finds them, and any logical implementation of this would display title results first.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the time you list is probably not on a cold start and listing the content is different from searching which gets extra infos out of the filenames, but right as said search in nautilus is known to be suboptimal and could for sure use improvements

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug is old and Ubuntu changed quite a lot since, there has also been no activity here nor similar reports. Closing since we believe the issue as described is deprecated but feel free to file a new report if you still have problems in recent Ubuntu versions.