Description of Problem: Attempts to use Nautilus on a machine with 233 MHz K6 (AMD) processor is not only slow beyond any point when it can be considered anything but a mere curiosity and a "test of a concept" but it also brings the whole working machine practically to a halt. It would have to be at least two orders of magnitude faster before it can be seriously considered as fit for anything. The situation is aggravated by the fact that killing this monstrosity is not an obvious task even if it is not respawned by Gnome sesssion. Once started, even from a terminal window, it keeps coming back. This is very nasty and antisocial behaviour. Not mentioning this small detail that a user interface is bad and confusing. To clearly demonstrate that you can try to repeat a trivial experiment which I did. Try to ask a novice user, NOT a Nautilus developer, to use Nautilus to switch a broken Help facility to something else and see how this will go. Extra points if a user will end up with 'gnome-help-browser'. So far everybody on which I tried that miserably failed while there was at least a fighting chance for the same task with 'gnomecc'. The fact that after every try one has to wait, and wait, and wait... with nautilus before someting will happen does not help here at all. If this is a meant as an interface for those with machines fast enough that their patience will be still sufficient then it should not be used as a default one but possible as an alternative.
The desktop isn't really intended to work on 233 mhz (though memory is the more important factor in determining speed). In any case, gmc is still included, feel free to use it on old machines. Nautilus is the default since it is nicer for people with more typical machines. The speed issues are known, they are getting better, I'm not going to leave a bug open for a general "could be faster" comment though, that doesn't help track the work in progress.
> The desktop isn't really intended to work on 233 mhz (though memory is the > more important factor in determining speed). Oh, really? So how come that it worked for a number of years by now on the machine in question, and quite well - thank you very much, and even before this machine was upgraded to its "speedy" state. I am afraid that this response only shows that the whole concept of Nautilus as a default interface is arrogant and fundamentally broken. It is not really usable in any reasonable sense on a 750 MHz machine as well.
Because it used to work, and now it doesn't, because other priorities are higher than working on a 233, and there is a tradeoff. The software is open source, and gmc is still there. So you can set up your system as you like. The defaults are for the "average" customer, the open source and configurability are so non-average customers can adapt things to their needs.
This is something that I wish we had more time to investigate. Mostly because of this: 300Mhz Cyrix CPU, 256MB RAM: Nautilus FAST 850Mhz Celeron CPU, 256MB RAM: Nautilus SLOW 1.0Ghz Duron CPU, 256MB RAM: Nautilus OK 1.7Ghz Pentium 4 CPU, 512MB RAM: Nautilus FAST This doesn't make any sense, especially on the 300Mhz box. Nautilus runs great on all the hardware I have here at my desk, but I know for a fact it runs poorly for some people. The only problem is that I don't think this can simply be chalked up to "slow hardware". Please feel free to investigate further. I concur that this is "notabug".
Yes, the varying results are not surprising to me. The kinds of things in your directories, use/nonuse of NFS, and other sorts of things are important, plus the kernel in use. It'll all get sorted out as we do more rounds of profiling.