Recently, Eye of Gnome (eog) was extremly slow during startup and when switching between images. Starting eog took around 4-8 seconds which is to much for an acceptable working performance.
Gnome Bug 500772 brought me to the following workaround: Simply remove ~/.recently-used.xbel
It seems that this XML file becomes very large and parsing will take much time. After removing this file eog starts in less than a second and also switching between images is really fast now.
