Nautilus crashes on folder with many thousands of files

[jdo]

Binary package hint: nautilus

Nautilus shows a message that there are too many file to show them all, if a folder contains more then 10000 files. But if I continue to work on that folder (selecting them all with Ctrl+A, deselecting a few, trying to delete) nautilus freezes and crashes. During the freeze, it does not use any CPU time, but there is no response and no graphic update.

I might depend on the available memory, since it takes sometimes a minute before it crashes. And while I am working in that folder, the total number of files on het bottom-left is still counting. The folder was in icon-view.

After reducing the number of files to 10000, I still got the message (too many files to show them all), but Nautilus did not crash. And I could easily delete them in two steps (in two steps, because I didn't see them all).

Ubuntu: Dapper (upgrade from Breezy), with all updates.
CPU: AMD Athlon Thunderbird 1400
Memory: 512MB
Kernel: K7
Nautilus: 2.14.3

jdo

[Mateusz Drożdżyński (matid)]

Thanks for taking your time to report this bug, however we'd be grateful if you could read the debugging procedures for program crash (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DebuggingProgramCrash) and then provide a more complete description of the problem.

Please, make sure that you attach the generated files (the backtrace and optionally the output of Valgrind) to this bug by clicking 'Attach File' link.

Thanks in advance.

[jdo (jdo-deactivatedaccount)]

I noticed that nautilus-dbg is available in synaptic, but I don't understand gdb right now. Sorry.

The normal trace information with bugbuddy is attached.

Meanwhile, I gladly got rid of those many (15000 ... 20000) files.

jdo.

[Mateusz Drożdżyński (matid)]

Thanks for your debugging information, I'd be helpful if you could try debugging it with gdb.
After you install nautilus-dbg package, follow the process of using gdb described here: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace

Again, we appreciate your cooperation, it will undoubtedly help the developers to solve your problem.

If you had any further questions or problems, make sure to leave a comment here.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug, http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=348200 has a similar backtrace upstream. For the debug packages no need to do anything, gdb get symbols automatically with them. Could you install libc6-dbg and libgnomevfs2-0-dbg and get a new backtrace?

[jdo (jdo-deactivatedaccount)]

Unable to repeat the crash.

I created as many as 100000 (hundred-thousand) files, and tried opening, selecting, icon view, list view, strange file names, text and non-text contents, etc. but nautilus (the normal version, not the debug version) performed okay.

Perhaps the names of the files, or the contents of the files has something to do with it. But I don't have my original files anymore, and those files caused a crash every time.

Perhaps this bug can be suspended or closed (for now).

kind regards,
jdo

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Closing for now then, feel free to reopen if you get a debug backtrace for it

[Lonnie Lee Best (launchpad-startport)]

I'm able to reproduce this behavior as follows:

1. Download this file:
http://openclipart.org/downloads/0.18/openclipart-0.18-full.zip
(if that exact file isn't available simply download the latest full-release here: http://openclipart.org/media/downloads)

2. Before extracting it with File Roller (the default extractor), be sure to un-check the "Re-create Folders" option, so that all the files in the archive are written to a single folder without having sub-folders.

3. Navigate to the folder where the files were extracted to (using Nautilus).

Nautilus will lock up and no folders will be displayed and your desktop icons will disappear until you force quit Nautilus.

[Lonnie Lee Best (launchpad-startport)]

I'm opening this because I believe that the instructions I posted will consistently reproduce this problem.

[Lonnie Lee Best (launchpad-startport)]

In the instructions I gave earlier, perhaps it isn't the number of files (17,000+) that is the problem; it may exclusively be the *type* of files contained in the folder, specifically the svg files:
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/2288

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Tried to reproduce this bug with latest comment tarball and is working fine with latest Nautilus available on Hardy, there's no crash on it. Feel free to re open this report if you experience the same problem with Hardy, thanks.