nautilus uses lots of memory when showing properties of large file

[Heiko Selber]

Binary package hint: nautilus

I right-clicked on a large file (a .flv movie with 262 MB on an NTFS partition, video codec : FLV1, audio codec: mp3 as reported by VLC) and chose "Eigenschaften" (German, translates to "Properties", I guess).

It looks as if nautilus tries to swallow the entire file just to display its properties.

This caused nautilus to freeze; after a while, a dialog appeared with a (German) text meaning roughly "trying to display properties window, click cancel to abort". I clicked cancel, but the entire system was close to frozen, and was obviously swapping like mad.

I checked with "free" on the command line and "Systemüberwachung" (System Monitor?): almost all physical memory (384 MB) was used; nautilus used roughly 200MB; the CPU load was below 2%.

I waited for about 15 minutes without any change, then decided to kill nautilus (by clicking the X in the corner of the window). This took about 2 minutes. When it finally succumbed, the system was responsive again.

I use Gutsy (7.10) with nautilus 2.20.0. VLC is my default video player (for this file type).

The bug may be related to Bug #19756, but I decided to write a new one, because I was scared off by its status "invalid". I don't want this to be ignored.

ProblemType: Bug
Architecture: i386
Date: Thu Feb 14 23:37:44 2008
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 7.10
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/nautilus
Package: nautilus 1:2.20.0-0ubuntu7
PackageArchitecture: i386
ProcCmdline: nautilus --sm-client-id 117f000101000120301762200000052090002 --screen 0
ProcCwd: /home/hok
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games
 LANG=de_DE.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: nautilus
Uname: Linux schlepper 2.6.22-14-generic #1 SMP Tue Feb 12 07:42:25 UTC 2008 i686 GNU/Linux

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Hardy Heron. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the actively developed release. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/

[Heiko Selber (heiko-selber)]

Unfortunately I am unable to boot hardy alpha 4 with this particular computer. Its CD drive is broken and I don't have a replacement (it's a laptop).

I tried to reproduce the bug with the hardy live CD on another PC, however, and it didn't occur. But if the bug is due to an obscure interaction between packages installed on the original computer, it wouldn't occur on the rather clean live environment, would it?

BTW: As an addition to the original report: it doesn't matter whether the file is on NTFS or ext3, or whether VLC or totem is the default player for flv files.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing since nautilus changed a lot of hardy and the bug is not likely due to it anyway but rather some video player doing the properties for your example, feel free to reopen if you try using the same example on hardy and still get the issue

[Heiko Selber (heiko-selber)]

I just checked on hardy: the problem is obviously solved.