Ubuntu 10.04 LTS

My folder LQfiles contains ~2500 files. Just today using those files has become markedly slow.
Launching a File Browser on LQfiles takes ~2 minutes whereas it formerly took 10 seconds.
Launching an edit session on one of the files is instant. Editing runs at normal speed.
Saving the changed file under the same name ("save") is instant.
Saving the changed file under a different name ("save as") takes ~10 seconds whereas it formerly was instant.
Closing the File Browser takes ~15 seconds whereas it formerly was instant.

My hard drive is only 10% full. This slowness developed today.

Have I come to a Knee In The Curve phenomenon? What to do?

Daniel B. Martin

Symptoms like that occur when there are hardware problems with a disk. Assuming that that folder resides in a partition on the disk sda, what is the output of Please use code-tags to post that output.

1 members found this post helpful.

if you launch an edit session on one of those files without opening the file manager first, e.g. from command line with absolute path:does it also take too long?

it could be your filemanager is having problems with processing all those files, or just one of them. did you say 2500files in 1 (one) directory?

1 members found this post helpful.

Thank you, TobiSGD and and ondoho for your interest in this thread.

I am a recreational programmer, entirely self-taught in the Linux realm. Consequently there are great gaps in my knowledge. Much of what I know has been picked up by reading Linux Questions forums, hence the name LQfiles. I don't know enough to answer the questions directly but hope this narrative will be useful.

I have many small bash scripts with names of this form ...
/home/daniel/Desktop/LQfiles/dbm***.bin
... where *** is a numeric.
Most operate on an input file with a name of this form ...
/home/daniel/Desktop/LQfiles/dbm***inp.txt
... and generate an output file with a name of this form ...
/home/daniel/Desktop/LQfiles/dbm***out.txt

The majority of these files contain fewer than 50 lines.

The folder /home/daniel/Desktop/LQfiles contains 2,476 items, totalling 2.4 GB. It contains no other folders, only files.

gedit /path/to/file.txt opens an edit session instantly, same as it does from the file manager.
Saving the edited file works instantly unless I change the name by doing a Save As. In that case it takes ~10 seconds.

Is there some practical limit to the number of files which reside in any one folder? If need be, I could restructure LQfiles to contain only folders, with each folder containing a subset of the present-day LQfiles.

Daniel B. Martin

so am i.you said differently in your first post. which is it to be?i don't know. there probably is.i think it would be wise to do so and see if that changes the problem.
it's a nice challenge to make a shell script for that ;-)
and while you're at it, maybe you find some corrupt files which are causing problems.

1 members found this post helpful.

You are correct; I contradicted myself. The Original Post has been edited to correct, clarify, and expand the symptom report.

There should be only hard limits how many folders a file-system can handle (dependent on the filesystem in use), but not a "if you go across this number it will become slow" limit. I have never seen such behavior before and I have no clue what could cause it.

i thought maybe the thumbnailer is eating up resources.

I always use List View so the thumbnailer overhead is not (or should not) be a factor.

Daniel B. Martin

I created seven subdirectories. They are:
LQ2 which contains all files with names starting with dbm2.
LQ3 which contains all files with names starting with dbm3.
LQ4 which contains all files with names starting with dbm4.
...
LQ8 which contains all files with names starting with dbm8.

LQfiles now contains those seven LQn folders and 329 files.
Launching a File Browser on LQfiles takes ~11 seconds.

I don't know if this should be considered a solution or a workaround.
Either way, the outcome is satisfactory so we can mark this thread SOLVED.

Daniel B. Martin