Hi John. I can certainly understand your frustration that there's been no response for a long time. Unfortunately, I'm not a dev, so I won't be much help in terms of actually fixing the problem. I just came across the bug and was interested in whether it still existed as there have been many updates to Ubuntu since you reported your problem.
I think what might be useful to see on this particular issue are some exact steps somebody can take to reproduce the issue you described. For example, Step 1. Install Ubuntu with an ext3 file system # or may be create an ext3 filesystem on an already installed system Step 2. Create 70,000 small text files in a directory # if you had a particular method for creating the 70,000 1K text files, perhaps using a 'for' loop or similar - include this.... Step 3... and so on. That way whoever looks at the bug can at least verify and confirm the issue you've described. With easy to follow reproducer steps using a more recent version of Ubuntu, I'd imagine it would be easier for someone to make progress with the bug. FWIW, I was unable to reproduce this issue on a Trusty install but I use an ext4 fs and that, as you alluded to previously, may be a very important factor. Unfortunately, with my current set up I'm not able to test using ext3. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to gedit in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/761781 Title: Gedit takes many minutes to start if there are many files in directory Status in gedit package in Ubuntu: Incomplete Bug description: Binary package hint: gedit Gedit takes forever (many minutes) to start up if there are a lot of files in the same directory. It also takes a similar time to exit. I had about 70,000 small text files (each around 1K) in a directory. Double clicking on one in Nautilus resulted in many minutes before GEdit appeared. In contrast, other editors work instantly, e.g. nano, vim. Even Open Office opens any of these files quickly! Perhaps http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=922587&page=2 post #18 has a clue to why there is this horrendous delay. "I think I know why it takes so long to load: How many files/folders does the directory you are trying to load have? gedit remembers the last directory, and it could be the fact that your last used directory has a lot of files/folders to be read." It sounds as if GEdit is trying to be too clever, and whatever it's doing with the last used directory needs to be rethought. Though I don't think this is the complete explanation, because I believe this was the first time I'd tried to use GEdit in this directory. Using Ubuntu 10.10. gedit: Installed: 2.30.3-1ubuntu1 Candidate: 2.30.3-1ubuntu1 Version table: *** 2.30.3-1ubuntu1 0 500 http://gb.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/ maverick/main i386 Packages 100 /var/lib/dpkg/status To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/gedit/+bug/761781/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp