It was Nautilus file manager in Ubuntu that used to drag if you opened a folder with a few thousand files. It was it was essentially doing at least one request for each file when you opened a folder and this was limited by the spin rate of the HDD. So if you had 5,400 files and a 5400RPM drive, yep that would take a full minute to resolve.

Eventually the solution really just become - get an SSD because you could throw thousand of requests and the results was fast enough.