Why does nautilus read directories in advance?

I'm creating a tool base on FUSE that populates a directory (~/sites) with fuse filesystems. When you read a subdir (for example ~/sites/stackoverflow.com) a sftp/ftp/webdav/s3 connection is made to that host.

This works beautifully with most t开发者_如何学Goools (bash, editors et cetera) but when I enter ~/sites/ with nautilus it pre-reads all directories. Nautilus will read all dirs under ~/sites. So if I have 32 hosts under ~/sites/ that would fire up 32 connections.

Why is nautilus doing that and is there a way to disable that behaviour?

It may be the "Preview" feature that counts the number of items in each folder.

Try disabling it. Open any folder, and go to "Edit" in the menu, then "Preferences" and then in the "Preview" tab you'll see some options regarding this. Disable all of them.