slow Eye of GNOME start

Thanks for your report, Is this reproducible only with that image or with any of the images you have in the directory? If so can you please submit that image to the report? thanks in advance.

There is a similar issue upstream on http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495825 and a the version in hardy should make things better, could you give it a try and let we know how it works?

Pedro, this is reproducible with any image in the directory. I agree that this does look similar to http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=495825. If you think it's worthwhile I can find out if my employer will allow me to send you the entire collection of images to play with (it's about 112MB); I could put it on an FTP somewhere.

Sebastien, this is my only computer and I use it to earn a living, so I can't install Hardy Alpha 4. Is there an easy and safe way for me to get a copy of the eog binary from Hardy?

I just downloaded today's Hardy release and give it a try.
there is an improvement but not compleetly fixed.
Better is to show the results and see for yourself:

THE NEW VERSION:
----------------------------------------------------------------------------
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu hardy (development branch) \n \l

ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ ls | wc -l
1
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ time eog 1295a9c9a9dcf8c56815dda9417560e1.png

real 0m3.702s
user 0m0.260s
sys 0m0.092s
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ cd ../thumbs/
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/thumbs$ ls | wc -l
4556
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/thumbs$ time eog 1295a9c9a9dcf8c56815dda9417560e1.png

real 0m12.126s
user 0m5.636s
sys 0m0.252s
ubuntu@ubuntu:/media/MIHAI007'S/thumbs$

GUSTY VERSION:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ cat /etc/issue
Ubuntu 7.10 \n \l

mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ ls | wc -l
1
mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ time eog 1295a9c9a9dcf8c56815dda9417560e1.png

real 0m9.616s
user 0m0.324s
sys 0m0.048s
mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/oneimage$ cd ../thumbs/
mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/thumbs$ ls | wc -l
4556
mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/thumbs$ time eog 1295a9c9a9dcf8c56815dda9417560e1.png

real 0m44.067s
user 0m7.392s
sys 0m6.868s
mihai007@mihai007-laptop:/media/MIHAI007'S/thumbs$

Thanks, that confirm the upstream comments, the new version is better but there is still work to do there

I'm not sure why this bug has been assigned low importance. I am experiencing serious lag times on a large file server with lots of media to the point that I am about to investigate options other than eog, which I now consider functionally unusable.

I forgot about this, I now know what the problem was. Indeed it should be a bug, but it is not what I thought it was.

eog and/or nautilus creates thumbnails, but they are never destroyed. so if you are dealing with a lot of images, or just moving them around a lot and viewing them in nautilus, the thumbnail directory quickly gets very large.

it can be resolved easily by a cron that deletes old files in the thumbnail directory, but that assumes a technically proficient user.

there should be some mechanism that treats the thumbnail directory as a cache that needs maintenance (as the cron solution does)

It would be much much better to throw thumbnails away and regenerate them than to render eog and nautilus unusable because of a glut in the thumbnail directory.

I am also having the same problem. As mihai007 on 2007-01-10 here,

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/eog/+bug/78710

, the problem is probably with image collection preview scanning the directory preemptively even when the pane isn't activated. This isn't a wishlist, but definitely a bug since it can be a real show stopper with folders containing images in the thousands.

The problem persists in Ubuntu 12.04. If the problem cannot be fixed, I think the desktop team should think about shipping a faster image viewer.

Another alternative to consider might be Xfce's Ristretto. It is much faster and I find more stable. <http://goodies.xfce.org/projects/applications/ristretto>