Ubuntu
nautilus package

Deleting many files in opened folder takes very long time

Bug #47842 reported by Bazon on 2006-06-01

This bug affects 1 person

Affects		Status	Importance	Assigned to	Milestone
	Nautilus	Expired	Medium	gnome-bugs #343616
	nautilus (Ubuntu)	Fix Released	Low	Unassigned

Bug Description

steps to reproduce:

1. Be sure you have a "delete" option in your nautilus contextmenu (see behaviour in nautilus options)

2. Use Nautilus to navigate to a directory with many files you can delete, e.g. ~/.thumbnails/normal (For me, that folder included about 10000 files)

3. Select all files (e.g. with CRTL+A) and choose "delete" from the contextmenu.

what happens:
Deleting these files takes ages (for me: 10000 files in prospected 11 hours) and CPU load is maximum.

Probably because nautilus sorts all files after each one delted.

When I closed that nautilus window, deleting was a question of seconds.

what should happen:
Deleting many files should be fast and shouldn't stress the CPU.

Revision history for this message

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2006-06-01:

I've forwarded the issue upstream: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=343616

Changed in nautilus:
assignee:	nobody → desktop-bugs
status:	Unconfirmed → Confirmed

Revision history for this message

Andrew Bennetts (spiv) wrote on 2007-04-16:

I've experienced this too. I selected a little over 10000 files in my /tmp directory, and hit the Delete key. Nautilus is has been using 100% CPU for many minutes already, and has also started swapping as it apparently tried to use nearly 600MB of memory.

In my case the files were "testbzrXXXXXXX.log" files, mostly empty ones, that have no thumbnails when viewed with nautilus, just a standard icon. I was in "View as List" mode.

Revision history for this message

Pedro Villavicencio (pedro) wrote on 2008-01-29:

This is still an issue with latest nautilus on Hardy.

Changed in nautilus:
status:	Confirmed → Triaged

Revision history for this message

Jakob Unterwurzacher (jakobunt) wrote on 2009-04-29:

Still in Jaunty.

Revision history for this message

Akdo (menoft) wrote on 2009-05-17:

Same problem there

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2010-09-16

Changed in nautilus:
importance:	Unknown → Medium

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2012-08-06

Changed in nautilus:
status:	New → Incomplete

Bug Watch Updater (bug-watch-updater) on 2015-06-08

Changed in nautilus:
status:	Incomplete → Expired

Revision history for this message

Sebastien Bacher (seb128) wrote on 2019-02-06:

Do you still see that issue in newer versions?

Changed in nautilus (Ubuntu):
status:	Triaged → Incomplete

Revision history for this message

Paul White (paulw2u) wrote on 2019-12-16:

Bug report did not expire due to bug watch
Upstream report closed "RESOLVED OBSOLETE" on 2015-06-08
as not reproducible in nautilus 3.14
No reply to comment #6 or any report for over 10 years
Several users were affected so issue must have been fixed