Nautilus hangs on long operations

[Pierre Wieser <pwieser trychlos org>]

Hi

In my daily work, the file manager, i.e. Nautilus, is one of my
main tools. As I deal with lot of big files (100 to 500 MB), I
have to notice that the behavior of Nautilus when copying/moving
these files is rather boring.

Moving one file is yet bearable: the UI keeps just a bit less
responsive.

If I try to move a second file, or just try to do some not-immediate
operation on the file manager, then it hangs for some 5 to 20 or 30
seconds, i.e. all Nautilus windows become greyed and I have just to
wait until something I do not know about, maybe correlated with the
long operations initiated before, but maybe not...

While I perfectly understand that a long operation is.. well, a long
operation, I do not understand why this should affect _all_ Nautilus
windows which are opened on other places!

As I understand the Nautilus code, it makes its best efforts to only
use async operations. But AFAIK, GLib async functions just try to
take advantage of in-process idle time. This is not multithreading.

All this preliminary to have two questions:

- Are these hangs seen by other users ? Or am I the only one to notice
this ??

- If my async vs. multithread analysis is right, should not Nautilus
make more usage of OS multithreading capabilities ? In the ideal,
should not every tab run in its own thread ?

I would be very happy to have your comment about these two points.

Regards
Pierre