Normally I would unzip the files to my local computer, start up gFTP, and simply upload the files. Quick and easy.

For a change I decided to do the whole process within Nautilus since I have the ftp account to my web host set up as a mounted folder within Nautilus. Soon after starting I regretted this choice, the main problem was one of speed.

My internet connection varies slightly but averages around 8-10 Mbits/s download and upload since it’s an symmetric line. However tonight when uploading 2 folders containing 511 files Nautilus would spend about 3 minutes just preparing for uploading and then it took about 25 minutes to uplad the files.

During this time my netspeed applet reported an upload speed of about 20kbits/s. Just to check it wasn’t a problem at my end I emailed a 2 MB file just afterwards and sure enough it was sent in a matter of seconds.

Ironically enough, today I was reading an ars technica review about the release of GNOME 2.22 and the new GNOME virtual file system (GVFS). It sound like something that will fix a lot of my complaints with the current system which, to be frank, just seems unreliable.

As another example, just a few days ago I tried the ‘Connect to Server’ option with Nautilus to mount an SSH connection. Nautilus just responded with the error:

Nautilus cannot display “ssh://root@172.16.*.***:22/”.

Please select another viewer and try again.

I know this works fine from the command line so it’s definately a Nautilus issue.