I had a issue with ranger when dealing with a file system over a network. It would hang on me for seconds when first entering the directory also when left idle for a while. Ran a profiler and found that the function taking the most time was named get_free_space called from /ranger/gui/widgets/statusbar.py:240
I have currently just changed the section to look like this: #right.add(human_readable(self.env.get_free_space( \ # target.mount_path), seperator='') + " free")
right.add("", seperator='' + " free")
It solved my issue and also improved performance on my local file system when dealing with large amounts of directories.