JupyterLab frontend is slow to load when jupyter-drives is installed

[ellisonbg]

Running jupyter-drives with JupyterLab 4.3.1. I am naticing a significant delay in loading of the JupyterLab UI when jupyter-drives is installed. On my system, without jupyter-drives, the UI loads or page refreshes in under 2 seconds. With jupyter-drives this goes up to 5-7 seconds. Because the delay also shows up when I do a page refresh, it is clear that it is something with the frontend, rather than the startup of the server. When I see the delay, I see the following extra lines in the browser console:

The only other clue is that the delay happens after the new tab or windows opens and the page turns white, but before any of the actual UI loads.

[DenisaCG]

Thank you for opening this issue.

I have not been able to reproduce it when working with the extension in dev mode and starting from a new environment, but the browser console showed the same warning when installing the extension directly with pip install jupyter-drives. It seems that upon installation of the extension, the jupyterlab version changes to v4.2.6 and that is causing the console warning with the miss-matched package versions. I have opened this PR which updates the imported packages.

It is not clear if the page refresh rate is delayed only because of this - even with no warnings in the console, the page refresh time is still slower than without the extension installed. I will continue looking into this.

[DenisaCG]

The delay when loading the page is coming for the drivesListProvider plugin, as it is individually extracting the region of each drive when listing and it takes those few extra seconds. The linked PR updates the logic, such that the region is extracted only when mounting the drive (so when it is first opened from the DriveBrowser). This way the initial delay when refreshing the page is gone, but there will be a 1-2 second delay when first accessing a drive.