Discrepancy in Files/Nautilus performance vs du command-line tool for counting folder size and items

[fagark]

I recently noticed a significant difference in the speed and performance between Nautilus and du command-line tool when counting the number of items and the size of a folder.

Here’s the test I performed in the terminal:

$ time (echo "Size:" $(du -sh ~/Downloads/Elements | awk '{print $1}') && echo "Items:" $(find ~/Downloads/Elements | wc -l))
Size: 767G
Items: 804341

real    0m6,351s
user    0m2,516s
sys     0m3,969s

Using this, the folder size was calculated as 767 GB and the total number of items as 804,341 in just about 6 seconds.

However, when using Nautilus, it took a staggering 2 minutes and 50 seconds to count the same number of files (off by 1) and calculate the folder size. The size difference is likely due to base-10 vs. base-2 reporting, but the slowness is what stands out the most.

Observations:

• Terminal tools like du and find are extremely efficient.
• Nautilus takes a much longer time to process the same information.
• This discrepancy is surprising, especially when working with a large folder like this (800k+ items).

Has anyone else experienced such a lag in Nautilus? Is there any way to optimize its performance when working with directories containing a large number of items? Or is this simply a limitation of the graphical interface?

[applecheeks37]

You may want to look here for possibly some answers as to increasing speed:

why is nautilus slow?

But the long and short of it is basically Nautilus is also scanning the contents of the files to possibly include a preview, and an icon that it can use. Terminal doesn't really care, so it's going to be faster when very large amounts of files are involved.

You might get nautilus faster by disabling a few things, but it'll never be as fast as a terminal for doing such things.

[Aravisian]

This also will likely be true across all file managers due to indexing. So not just Nautilus.