Apps with the places bar (file open dialog, dolphin, gwenview, perhaps others) are really slow to start if I have disks in my optical drives. Sometimes it isn't bad, only like *5 seconds* (typical for them is less than one second to a second and a half, if optical disks aren't in). This wouldn't be quite as bad if they weren't so sluggish after they started. Sometimes they take much, much longer though. (I just timed Gwenview opening and it took 20 seconds. Sometimes it takes even longer than this.)

Is this a known bug? Is there a *good* workaround? (I like the places bar, I like dolphin, I like gwenview. Avoiding them is not something I like having to do.)

I'm pretty sure this bug was introduced in the 4.6 release cycle.

This is probably caused by the remaining disk space bar they show. I'm guessing that if they are slow to spin up, it causes quite a bit of delay as the process is blocked while it spins up.

In that case, is there any way to disable that? It's definitely not worth a severe performance penalty.

The combination of the unreasonable delays (minimum 5 seconds, "spun up" or not.) and then extremely sluggish & unresponsive file browsing makes things effectively unusable.

Note that when they're already spun means they're going to be busy doing something else, and then the performance penalty is far worse, not better.

As far as I am aware, it is possible to disable it - although it should not be causing too much of a performance impact once it has checked the initial usage.

I just timed Gwenview opening and it took 20 seconds.

I've had a similar problem with gwenview and NFS mounts. If I've looked at a picture over NFS with it, then starting it in the future makes it be *really* slow, around that 20-second mark you mention although I didn't time it, so that's just a guess.