How to stop Konqueror wasting time upon accessing music folder?
 

I set Kubuntu to use Konqueror rather than Dolphin as the file explorer. After customizing it it does the job just fine, except for one thing: whenever I access my music folder, which contains some five thousand ogg files, it sends the hard disk into a frenzy and freezes up for about two minutes. Then, when it's done with what I assume is a file scan, resumes working as if nothing had happened.
I imagine it's reading tags, or something. How do I stop it from doing that? I browsed the configuration menu and tried changing some settings that I thought were relevant, but it did no good.

Thanks.

In order for a file browser to display the contents of a folder, it has to read the entries written in the file table of the file system for that folder. With that many items, you can't expect any better performance without upgrading your hardware, mainly processor clock cycle, and RAM memory.
In order to get better performance without a hardware upgrade, split the contents of that folder into multiple folders.

Double post for some odd reason. Only clicked submit once.

This is not specifically due to sound files and their tags - it's rather that 5 thousand files (any file format) will be a drag for a GUI file manager to be displayed. Displaying 5 thousand text files would also take a lot of time.

Either avoid that folder, or create a reasonable structure of sub-directories.

It is probably easier to create a playlist for sound files in many directories rather than opening a single directory with that amount of files.

Debian

Then how is it that I can access the very same folder under Windows with no trouble whatsoever?
It takes a bit longer than normal folders to come up in Explorer, but after, say, three or four seconds, it's all there.

Even Amarok can list the contents of the entire music folder without screeching to a halt.

In Windows, the information regarding the first few items loaded in memory are displayed ASAP before it completes loading all 5 thousand.
In konquerer, the information for all 5 thousand are loaded into memory before something is displayed.
This is just my interpretation based on experience having observed the same, does'nt mean I'm right.

Just a different way of working with ram/swap/paging.
One should not compare different operating systems/desktop environments. If they were the same, they would'nt be different.

It's just that I'm used to Linux software working better than the Win counterparts, so this was unexpected.

Regardless, even Amarok (under Linux, of course) doesn't do it this way. I'm pretty sure it doesn't load anything at all, it just displays the files, then the hard disk activity light turns off.
Can't Konqueror be set up to behave the same?

This problem with displaying 5000 files in a single directory is not really about Linux or Windows being better than the other. It's just that Konqueror is implemented to have all info's straight before displaying anything, while Explorer displays as it reads. Even in Explorer, if you want to page down to the last item in the 5000 list, it still would take time, I guess.

The advantage that Linux has is simply that you do not have to stick with the default file manager, but have a wide choice of alternatives, if you are not satisfied with Konqueror.

linux

now that I read that I was curious and tried to reproduce the issue with my /usr/lib (contains 4478 files and 299 folders). With konqueror it took like 10 or 20 seconds, nowhere near 2 minutes. You maybe exaggerated a bit.

Dolphin, however, is much faster (3-4 seconds, with progress bar, so waiting is not so boring :P)

could be, or perhaps your computer is just faster then the op's
but i agree the diferences is windows shows things as they load rather then waiting for it all to load before showing it

the same is true of the desktop in general, most linux desktop environments don't present the user with a desktop at all until it is close to ready whereas windows takes up to several minutes after the desktop shows before all the TSR (terminate and stay ready) programs load it is ready to use

Not really. If I press end on the keyboard, I'm there.

Konqueror satisfies me for everything but this.

The problem might be in the file types. Could Konqueror be reading the tags?

Yeah, but you don't have to twiddle your thumbs for long. I agree that it's nice to have things all preread and preloaded and ready to go, but the time I have to wait whenever I mistakenly click the music folder in Konqueror is ridiculous.
I've also noticed that even if I kill konqueror after I do that, the disk still keeps frenzying just as if I hadn't killed it.