Debugging nautilus slowness

Applications
1

This issue has been bugging me for a long time, but have not been able to find a solution. Looking for help finding the root cause and fixing the issue.

Setup

Running Linux mint 22.2. Have manually installed vanilla-gnome.

I have installed spotify, currently from their apt repository, previously as flatpak (no difference for issue).

The issue

I use nautilus (not linux mint’s default nemo) as a file browser. It seems to sometimes™ get “slow”.

  • It takes roughly 5 seconds to startup.
  • Switching folders can take 5 seconds.

This is only sometimes. If nautilus is fast it seems to work as I expect.

For some reason, and this bugs me a lot, it seems to be related to spotify, or playing music in general. I can consistently get nautilus to start being really slow by playing music. It’s fast when the music is off. It’s slow when I press play. Instantly.

Steps taken and things considered

On my laptop (same setup) this behaviour is completely absent! Like, completely. The laptop has the complete same setup (in fact, I use a bash file to install all my software on a fresh installation which I have done last week). Although I do keep my homedir between installations, so there may be some config item causing this. In fact, it’s what I expect.

  • I have already tried deleting ~/.config/nautilus and resetting all dconf items under /org/gnome/nautilus. No avail.
  • I use some gruvbox theme. Already tried default adwaita. No difference.
  • The issue is absent in nemo.
  • There is no issue if I play music in vlc / celluloid. However if I play music in Music it’s also slow! I THINK it’s related to music or some such, but I am hesitant.
  • htop / monitor give no indication that something is using obscene amount of cpu or disk.
  • There are no NFS. T
  • here are no errors related to pipewire
  • This could be a case of vanilla icecream (https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~wkw/humour/carproblems.txt), but I’m completely baffled how.

Experience level

Have used ubuntu since 2008. Relatively new to linux mint, but know my way around linux. Have always used gnome.

Questions

  • Where could I start properly debugging this?
  • Anyone with similar issues

Looking forward to some help and guidance.

2

Hi,

Does Linux Mint provide the latest Nautilus version (49.x) ?
There have been huge performance improvements in the last cycles.

For this kind of debugging, have a look at Sysprof, sampling all processes. The screenshots are a bit old, there is now a “flamegraph” view that is really nice to spot code hot paths.

3

Thanks for the response! Will check and revert.

4

Hi @dinand there already is a report for this but it’s missing information to figure out what is going wrong. Does it happen under Xorg, Wayland or both? Does it happen when you (from a CLI) stop nautilus with nauiltus -q and then run it with NAUTILUS_DISABLE_PLUGINS=TRUE nautilus ?

5

Thanks for the response. As soon as the issue re-occurs (it sometimes seems to not bother me for a while) I’ll try it out and respond to the report.

It seems I’m running v46, which is default for linux mint. Is there some obvious way to upgrade gnome? There’s no PPA, correct?

6

Not with Mint, although there are other distributions that provide up-to-date GNOME.