gvfsd-metadata on nfs homes produces large number of nfs requests

[Gökdeniz Karadağ]

Binary package hint: gvfs

On our Maverick machines, we are seeing the issue described at
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=561904

Summary: gvfsd-metadata enters a loop where it continually creates and renames files under $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
When home directory is on NFS, this puts excessive load on NFS server (our CPU load was 10+ before killing stray gvfs-metadata processes, afterwards it became ~0.40)

The redhat/fedora bug does not state a solution currently.

[Jeff Strunk (jstrunk-math)]

We are also seeing this issue. I think our interim strategy will be to make gvfsd-metadata not executable. Gnome seems okay without it.

[João Neves (jneves)]

Followed the information on this thread: http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1421580

 Will now wait to see if the problem repeats itself. It has been happening about once a day in the last week.

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaubitz)]

I have added the respective bug reports in Debian and Fedora/RHEL.

Also, there is an upstream bug report: https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=637095

FYI:

The linked Fedora/RHEL bug report contains in-depth analysis by Michael Karcher why this issue arises. He came to the conclusion that the bug cannot be easily fixed as this is a fundamental design issue.

Cheers,

Adrian

[John Paul Adrian Glaubitz (glaubitz)]

As a subscriber of the RedHat bug report (https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=561904) I received a message from a non-public duplicate of this bug report in the RedHat bug tracker which has been filed by a "strategic customer". The duplicate non-public bug report has therefore increased severity and will hopefully be fixed in the future with a new upsteam/patch release.

Adrian