Hi everyone,

there is an issue that's been annoying me for a while.

Let's take this situation as an example:
I plug in my slow USB flash drive and start copying some stuff to or from it in the background. Now, when I open the drive's contents in dolphin, of course it takes a while for the folder contents to load.
The problem is, that during that time the whole interface becomes unresponsive. I cannot press any buttons or switch to another folder. I can't even close dolphin.

The worst part, though, is that it doesn't only block while loading a folder, but also every time I hover over a sub-directory or file (probably because it's analyzing its contents to display the tool tip).

It makes me unable to use dolphin on the device while it's busy. The gtk file chooser does not have this problem. Of course, the folder contents don't load any faster than in dolphin, but it seems to load directory contents in a different thread in the background and I can at least switch directories. Also, it doesn't freeze when scrolling or hovering sub-folders.


Since long before the release of KDE 4.0 there was a hype about that "thread weaver" technology. I'm rather disappointed to see, that it's obviously not even used in KDE's most central UI applications as folder population seems to run in the same thread as the user UI.

Do you know if there are plans to work on this issue? I can't find anything in KDE's roadmap.

I will also file a BUG report, but I would like to discuss it first.

Whilst I don't know if there are plans to work on this, it is most certainly a bug and should not occur ( as KIO should cause all external io to occur in seperate processes )

KIO should cause all external io to occur in seperate processes

It probably does, but it seems like dolphin waits and blocks until (for example) the KIO job to examine a directory completes, so it can display the tool tip.

I will file a BUG report.