There is a bug in GVFS in Ubuntu 16.04. GVFS is the thing that Caja and Nautilus use to access/manipulate files. Currently in Ubuntu MATE 16.04 moving any more than a few files either completely freezes up the file manager or slows it down to a crawl. This bug is not limited to just Ubuntu MATE and Caja, Nautilus and other file managers derived from Nautilus are also affected.
Here is the procedure to follow to help us test the fix for a critical bug affecting Ubuntu MATE 16.04
Be aware that it's in the realm of possibilities that the proposed fix has a regression and therefore causes data loss. Before doing the test you should make sure you have a Backup. You should make sure you have a backup even if you're not doing the test.
This forum post hopefully will also give you a general idea of how to do SRU testing, since it's not an obvious process.
The steps listed below are derived from the indication in the following bug report:
Feel free to read the bug report in order to understand the relation between the steps to verify and the bug report later on.
- Update your Xenial install so it's up to date
- Right click on your desktop, open a terminal, then create two folders:
mkdir T1 T2
- Move into T1:
cd T1
- Create 1024 random files in T1 using the command:
i=1 && while [ $i -lt 1025 ]; do dd if=/dev/zero of=$i bs=4k iflag=fullblock,count_bytes count=1M; i=$[$i+1]; done
- Open
T1
in Caja, select all files using CTRL+A then cut them using CTRL+X - Open
T2
in a new Caja window, then paste the files using CTRL+V - Observe the transfer slowing to a crawl and jamming.
- Abort the operation, go to System -> Administration -> Software & Update, and in the last tab check "enable xenial-proposed"
- In the terminal, update but DO NOT upgrade all packages after that, we'll only upgrade the packages we're testing (gvfs with dependencies)
sudo apt update
sudo apt install gvfs/xenial-proposed
- Reload Caja:
caja -q
- Run the Test case again.
- Open
T1
in Caja, select all files using CTRL+A then cut them using CTRL+X - Open
T2
in a new Caja window, then paste the files using CTRL+V - Observe that the file transfer does not jam.
- Report your findings on the bug report in Launchpad, you need a launchpad account to do this.
- Go back to Software & Updates properties, last tab and un-check the option for
xenial-proposed
.