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This issue seems to have arisen after upgrading from 22.04 to 24.04.

  • When first logging in, Nautilus will open a folder in about 0.2-0.5 seconds, this is tolerable but still a lot slower than Thunar which is perceptually instantaneous (as it should be, my system is fast and uses SSDs).
  • After opening Steam, it takes much longer to open a folder, particularly if there are "many" (100-1000) files, it may take 10-20 seconds to open a folder. Thunar is still instantaneous.
  • browsing away from a folder and then back to it, still results in it taking 10 seconds to load, there has been no benefit from caching.
  • Closing Steam will result in the time going back down to 0.2-0.5 seconds.
  • After a while (maybe 10 minutes?) the slowdown seems to go away even with Steam remaining open.
  • Exiting and reopening Steam will make the slowdown occur again, though it seems to recover more quickly, probably because Steam is doing less.
  • I don't think the issue is specific to Steam, with Steam just being a large application that touches a lot of things. Also, I'm clearly not blaming Steam here, as Thunar remains instantaneous and Steam doesn't seem to impact any other applications.

Relevant System specs:

  • Ubuntu 24.04.1 LTS
  • Intel Core i5-12400F CPU
  • 32 GB ram
  • SSDs

Things I have tried:

apt purge nautilus && apt install nautilus

  • Setting ulimit much higher.

  • Purging ~/.cache

  • Purging anything I could find under ~/ related to nautilus

Looking for errors in syslog - there's nothing.

Running Nautilus with debug messages. During the 10 seconds, it is doing stuff with thumbnails, like this but a lot longer:

(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.060: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.060: Returning thumbnailed image, at size 22 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.071: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.077: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.077: Returning thumbnailed image, at size 30 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.093: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32
(org.gnome.Nautilus:24053): nautilus-file-DEBUG: 11:36:24.104: Called file_get_icon(), at size 32

The log doesn't show anything else happening during the 10 seconds other than thumbnail related stuff.

Possible solutions:

For me an obvious solution is to just use Thunar, even though I'm used to Nautilus.

However considering this is a fairly reproducible on my system, I'd be interested in trying to debug it further.

Edit: Subsequently I have upgraded to newer versions of Ubuntu and no longer have the issue in 25.04, as such I'm unable to verify a fix or that the issue still exists in 24.04.

Blake Walsh
  • 291
  • maybe consider installing Preload? Install it with sudo apt-get install preload – graham Oct 05 '24 at 10:01
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    many tasks where files are involved take much longer since I upgraded to 24.04 - didn't find a solution yet – Ingo Steinke Oct 11 '24 at 15:48
  • Does this answer your question: Some applications start very slow after boot on Ubuntu 24.04?? – Ajay Oct 22 '24 at 12:27
  • I had been facing this issue for a while - after deleting AppProtection (some citrix-related program) from my computer, along with all its remnants, this problem went away for me (so far). If you do have citrix on your computer, maybe try getting rid of it to see if it helps? – Forrest Flesher Jul 06 '25 at 22:28
  • I'm facing the same issue with a Ryzen 9 and 128 GB of RAM on GNOME after upgrading to 24.04. I’ve noticed that Nautilus becomes extremely slow when displaying folders with many files, especially when Chromium is open. However, if I close Chromium, Nautilus works much faster. Interestingly, this problem doesn't occur on other desktop environments like Cinnamon, where everything runs smoothly. I hope this information helps track down the cause. – stabu solaire Oct 22 '24 at 09:27
  • I see the same on my system – Simon Mar 13 '25 at 16:31
  • I’m experiencing a similar issue with Nautilus on Ubuntu 24.04, but in my case, it occurs when running WeChat (Linux 4.0.1 test version) instead of Steam. My system is a Ryzen 9 7950X with 32GB RAM and an SSD. When the issue occurs, opening Nautilus takes around 5 seconds, and switching between folders like Home or Downloads is also very slow. Closing WeChat resolves the issue, and Nautilus opens and switches folders normally. Using the ls command in the terminal is fast and unaffected. I hope this information helps with troubleshooting the problem. – Wayne May 28 '25 at 06:09

0 Answers0