>> Have you ever made Nautilus copy/move a huge directory tree
and then
>> started a similar task for other directories while Nautilus was
still
>> working on the first task?
>
> A directory containing 10,000 1MiB files moved to another directory
> completes immediately. Copying takes a while, as expected, and
multiple
> copies has the behavior you describe.
>
An SSD drive might not have this problem, but a spinning disk
definitely
will. You should never try running multiple copies on the same disk if
you want it to finish in a reasonable time. With one copy, you can do
long contiguous reads and writes, but if you have multiple copies
happening, the read and write head will be bouncing all over the disk.
________________________________________
So ideally this is the file manager job to
queue copy operations. This allows to do right even when the user is wrong, or wants to
launch big copy before coffee.