I know a submarine is slow, but that doesn't mean one have to code it that way .

What I'm talking about is that Nautilus is just SO slow. It takes ages to display something (before it was there in a jiffy). It just changed from one day to another.

Is there somewhere a setting or so I could tweak to make it run fast again?

I use nautilus with all default options coming from Ubuntu 6.10, except list view = 25% and icon view = 50%.

Thanks for any help

I doubt if those zoom options of views have anything to do with the speed (you can try it, by setting them back to 100%, if you like to). Did you update some packages when Nautilus became slow (it shouldn't be)? If you did do an update recently, see if Nautilus (or other gnome-related packages) were updated, perhaps post a list of those here for a start..

Nautilus-> Edit-> Preferences-> Preview-> "Other Previewable Files". You can make the size of file to thumbnail smaller or don't show thumbnails at all. Disabling all of these will yield the fastest speed. Your problem probably only occurs with folders with large numbers of files. If thumbnails are used, the first time a folder is viewed will be the slowest it can be.

bouncer: I didn't update any packages lately... It just became slow.
fragos: I don't think that's the issue because when I go to my "home folder" (default where Nautilus opens) it takes 2 or more minutes to start up. But when I go to "OperaDownloads" (much more files), it's like less then a second to start up... So I don't know what's it, but absolutely not the preview option.

Your focus is application startup. I wish Nautilus came up a little faster as well. Slower implies a lot more disk accesses to load. This has been an Openoffice problem as well. That performance has been greatly improved. I don't know if this applies to Nautilus but there is a preload function you might be able to use. You could also leave an open copy of Nautilus minimized or even in another workspace. Sort of like a preload. There are times, like searching for files where the command line can be lightning fast. I'm referring to the "locate" command. Try it, you'll be amazed. There's a cron job that runs "updatedb" daily which build the index used by locate. If you're looking for a file you created during this session you may need to run "sudo updatedb" yourself.