Hello, my problem (using Kubuntu 904, KDE 4.2.2) is that each time I open a folder with Dolphin where there are large files (mp4 recorded from tv), Dolphin bogs down the machine, eating about 1 GB of my 512 MB RAM, waiting minutes before responding to any input. (Everything is fast apart from this, the machine is OK.) It is worst when I insert a flash card, but happens on normal disk as well. It seems that Dolphin reads through all the files. I switched off the use of embedded previews, maximal file size for preview is 10 MB. I found nothing else about preview options.

Or is it some plugin? Top shows the offending process as Dolphin. I would expect leaner operation from a file manager.

Does anyone know what to do to make Dolphin just list my files and give me the copy, etc operations without first waiting for gigabytes of IO? Thanks.

Peter

When dolphin is encountering issues, do you see kio_thumbnail in the list of processes?

Hello, kio_thumbnail does not appear in the process list. On top is dolphin, plus kernel paging-related processes like kswapd, kblockd.

But I noticed now that it does not start immediately. Only when I move the pointer over a file I want to do something with, then minutes of unresponsive thrashing commences.

So I found a Properties pane on the right that is apparently populated by doing all this. Closing that pane seems to cure my problem. It can be disabled in the View/Panels menu as well. That pane has nothing from the file contents, just a default icon and file size, etc.

I think this is OK for now, thank you for the assistance. The default setting does not feel entirely correct to me. A mere hovering should not cause this, unless the required resources are known to be small.

Peter

Can you please report a bug for that behaviour? Make sure to include information such as the types of files in that directory, their sizes, etc.

Could you first try to upgrade your KDE installation? probably to KDE 4.2.4 at least? I think there were some fixes/changes in how Dolphin handled generating previews to make them non-blocking.