Freezing upon loading folder with a large number of files

[Tbusk]

What Happened?

When loading a large folder full of images, the window freezes for many seconds before becoming responsive again.

The resource usage does not increase at all before/during/after from what I can tell.

Steps to Reproduce

1. Open folder containing a large number (14k) of small in resolution images (0.4-20kb in size each).

Expected Behavior

Folder would open / become responsive quicker, and use more resources to accomplish this quicker. Currently I'm exploring datasets, and the number of files will likely grow much more, perhaps to hundreds of thousands, and of higher resolution.

OS Version

8.x (Circe)

OS Architecture

amd64 (on most hardwares)

Session Type

Classic Session (X11, This is the default)

Software Version

Latest release (I have run all updates)

Log Output

Hardware Info

Nothing unconventional, although this likely will be much worse on slower systems (worse cpu and storage stats) as I have a pretty beefy setup.

[jeremypw]

@Tbusk Thanks for the feedback. This sounds like a duplicate of e.g. #2605 and #2172. Some improvements have been made in the past but we need to port the code to Gtk4 and make use of the new dynamic views available there to make a significant difference to the Icon View for the number of files you mention. The bulk of the delay is down the Gtk.IconView widget taking exponentially longer to calculate the layout as the number of items increases.

At the moment, I can only suggest using List View for folders containing more than one or two thousand items.