Figured this out. Closing.
Cause:
I had intentionally put my home directory under mercurial, primarily to track
config files. .hgignore ignored everything.
The tortoisehg extension apparently ignores .hgignore. When I ran
nautilus with strace, the problem became clear: tortoisehg was
recursively stat'ing my entire home directory.
** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
Status: New => Invalid
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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1522177
Title:
nautilus sporadically very slow to start/refresh
Status in nautilus package in Ubuntu:
Invalid
Bug description:
System: Ubuntu 15.10, x86_64, SSD drive
Nautilus is sporadically extremely slow to start up or refresh a view
even when already running. The effect is bimodal: response is either
nearly immediate or extremely slow. For example, "nautilus ~/" is
either immediately responsive or takes ~10 seconds.
The behavior is independent of directory and invocation method; for
example, invoking via Unity Dash or Chrome's "show in folder" exhibits
similar bimodal responsiveness.
The bimodal switch seems to be related to a combination of when the
directory was last read (likely a cache effect) and whether the
directory had been modified (e.g., perhaps based on directory mtime).
The attached script and output demonstrate the effect on my laptop. It
executes "nautilus ~/" ten times, with sleep times of 0-5 seconds
between each. The data suggest that the bimodal switch due to a
putative cache timeout is ~5 seconds. That is, *all* invocations
separated by more that 5 seconds exhibit the slow mode responsiveness.
This is consistent with my experience, namely that nautilus startup is
*always* slow because real-world use invocations are always more than
5 seconds apart.
Access to the same directories in the terminal are never slow. I am
not aware of any general filesystem sluggishness (e.g., with
libreoffice, emacs, etc).
To manage notifications about this bug go to:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/1522177/+subscriptions
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