do you have an idea why opening just a plain ~640x480 photo takes 5+ seconds? that is awfully slow, and it uses a crazy amount of CPU, on top of that. The problem gets much worse at higher resolutions. 

This happens on all of my computers which are fairly powerful. This one has a 7200rpm disk, 1gb of ram, a P4 2.4ghz cpu, a geforce 5200 gpu.

Opening individual photos should not require a core duo, as far as I know?

I just did an unscientific benchmark using my wristwatch's chronometer. I opened a 1600x1200 jpeg image using eog (this image had not been opened in months), and it took 13 seconds (during which the cpu is hogged).

Reopening this same image after closing it = 5 seconds

Opening it with gliv* takes only 1.5 seconds. I also did another test, launching another new image (1920x1200 jpeg) with gliv first (to avoid warm start effects), it still loaded in 1.5 seconds.


But then, an interesting thing happens: if I launch a 1600x1200 image with eog *from the terminal*, it loads in 2 seconds, whereas it takes 2-3 times more time if launched by clicking on it from nautilus:

eog terminal 2 seconds 40
eog normal 6 seconds 60
gliv terminal 1 seconds 36

Those numbers are reproducible here, no matter what order I do this, I can obtain a 4 seconds difference by launching from the terminal; and gliv beats eog in all scenarios.

What is going on?