Comment 5 for bug 597512

I finally managed to attach strace before it stopped screwing up the system and it's just repeatedly calling lstat() on thousands and thousands of thumbnail files. That's clearly a dumb thing to be doing but I'm still surprised that it's so insanely slow as I'd expect the directory information to be fairly small and cached pretty quickly.

I don't know whether lstat() itself has any performance issues which would make it this slow. Maybe it's having to read information which isn't stored in the directory structure and thereby having to do tens of thousands of single block reads?

Oh, hang on: I'm using ecryptfs for my home directory. I wonder if it's some interaction between a poorly thought out directory scan and extra overhead due to ecryptfs?