As I recently migrated to KDE, I was surprised at how (relatively) long Dolphin takes to open. On my machine (Core i7) Nautilus and Thunar open instantly, but Dolphin takes about 1 second. I know that is not much, but still too much compared with others (even Windows Explorer opens almost instantly).

Is this the problem on my end (I migrated from Ubuntu by installing kubuntu-desktop, so there might be an issue here) or is it just the way Dolphin is? If so, does it bother you as well or do you think 1 second is acceptable?

edit: I tried disabling Akonadi, Strigi & Nepomuk but it hardly makes any difference.

It's hard to tell where the problem is without more information. Could you hide the 'Places' Panel and check if that fixes the problem?

I tried and it doesn't make much difference.

I was looking at some KDE review videos on youtube, for example http://youtu.be/zhRjMzwugZE at 00:23. He clicks on the Dolphin icon and it takes a long while until it opens. After the first opening it's a bit faster for me, but still not fast enough.

Dolphin also doesn't output any errors if launched from Konsole. So I guess I'm not really asking for a solution here, I just want to know if it's the same speed for you guys (SSD excluded) compared to Nautilus and Thunar and if yes, do you think this speed is acceptable?

Which version do you use? I think there were some speed issues in some versions, but it slowed down Dolphin considerably and is probably not what you're experiencing.

For what it's worth:

Code: Select all

archon :: ~ % time dolphin                 
dolphin(13794) KXMLGUI::ActionList::plug: Index  37  is not within range (0 -  17
dolphin(13794) KSambaSharePrivate::findSmbConf: KSambaShare: Could not find smb.conf!
dolphin(13794)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
dolphin(13794)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
dolphin(13794)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
dolphin(13794)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
dolphin(13794)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
dolphin(13794)/kdecore (KConfigSkeleton) KCoreConfigSkeleton::writeConfig:
dolphin  0.54s user 0.06s system 32% cpu 1.845 total

archon :: ~ % time thunar                 
thunar  0.18s user 0.03s system 11% cpu 1.828 total



I'm on SSD though. Subjectively, it does feel like Thunar shows up faster, but it also has less features than Dolphin I think. (There was a problem with installing Nautilus so I didn't test it.)

I don't see a big difference between Dolphin and Nautilus start up times here. Maybe Ubuntu keeps a Nautilus instance preloaded in the background to make it look like it starts instantly?

Hans you are right, my Dolphin is not that slow. Just noticeably slower at opening than others. Which I agree is understandable compared with Thunar because of the amount of features.

As for Nautilus: freininghaus, I was thinking that same thing and now I checked it and it appears to be exactly so: If I start nautilus in one terminal and close the GUI, the process doesn't stop. If I then start nautilus from another terminal, nautilus opens instantly. Which is exactly the behaviour I want from Dolphin, is there any option to keep Dolphin running?

You may want to try running Dolphin under Valgrind's Callgrind and then view the resulting file using KCacheGrind to see where the processing cycles are being spent in starting Dolphin up.

nsaje wrote:As for Nautilus: freininghaus, I was thinking that same thing and now I checked it and it appears to be exactly so: If I start nautilus in one terminal and close the GUI, the process doesn't stop. If I then start nautilus from another terminal, nautilus opens instantly. Which is exactly the behaviour I want from Dolphin, is there any option to keep Dolphin running?

Sorry, no. There is such a feature for Konqueror though (can be enabled in Konqueror's settings dialog).