Dolphin, Gwenview startup delay with no internet access

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Hi everybody,
I just discovered a rather unpleasant behavior of Dolphin and Gwenview (but I suspect many more KDE apps are having the same problem): if you’re connected to a network that have no internet access (e.g. a VPN that cannot exit to the internet), both Dolphin and Gwenview will have a huge delay upon startup.
For Dolphin I had to wait a couple of minutes (yes, MINUTES!), while Gwenview made me wait for at least 10 minutes.
Also, while Dolphin was usable after starting up, Gwenview was completely unusable, as every action (even resizing the window) would make the application unresponsive for a dozen seconds.
Is this a known problem?
Should I report a bug?

Thank you in advance
Cris

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Hi - do you have any saved/bookmarked “Places” that point to network resources, by chance? I was wondering as this sounded like the following bug, perhaps? 272361 – Unavailable mounts mounts with Places entries make clients (e.g. Dolphin, Gwenview, file open or save dialogs) hang or become extremely slow

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@johnandmegh thank you for the pointer to bug 272361.
I’m not sure it is the same problem, actually, but I’ll follow its evolution nonetheless.
I do have some network resources in the Places panel, but they point to my LAN… I don’t think the VPN is blocking those too, but I’m not sure… I’ll have to test.
I also have Dropbox, Google Drive, pCloud and Nextcloud in the Places panel. Those may be causing the delay, too.

But besides the “what is causing this behavior” question, what bugs me is the fact that Dolphin (and Gwenview) is so bad at handling this situation.
We are so used to take internet connectivity for granted, that modern software don’t put enough thought into handling the absence of connectivity (well, this is my impression, at least).
Dolphin should execute network code in another thread with respect to GUI code, so that users should never experience a non-responding UI.
If there’s no connectivity, obviously, Dolphin cannot show me the remote content, but it should gracefully fail by showing e.g. a spinner and normally handling user inputs.
What do you think?

Cris

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That might be worth checking into generally - I know I’ve had mixed results when trying to combine a VPN with using local network resources, although I’m sure I’m the problem there (I get lost pretty quickly trying to figure out network configuration, honestly!)

I’d be willing to bet that’s it - and yes, I’d agree that it’d be good to have a more graceful way of handling those situations. Perhaps something in how KIO handles “protocols” could be mapped over into how it handles directories in the filesystem if they have certain fstab properties, or something like that - likely needs someone with that situation on their device + the time and ability to dig into how KIO handles each situation?