Huge memory usage when changing background

[Taddeo Manzi]

When I open "change background" window in Settings, RAM usage of gnome-control-center goes over 2 gb. In practice I can't change background since gnome-control-center fills all memory, freezing the system.
In general, system will freeze without return every time a program fills the memory faster than the system moving memory to swap.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 18.10
Package: gnome-control-center 1:3.28.2-0ubuntu1
Uname: Linux 4.18.0-999-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.10-0ubuntu7
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Mon Aug 6 07:32:28 2018
InstallationDate: Installed on 2017-01-12 (570 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 16.10 "Yakkety Yak" - Release amd64 (20161012.2)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm-256color
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=it_IT.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: gnome-control-center
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to cosmic on 2018-07-24 (12 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, what's the content of your ~/Pictures? (the directory the settings list for backgrounds)?

[Taddeo Manzi (sinistristradali)]

Hi Sebastien,

it contains 1288 pictures and a folder with 24000 pictures... so it is a normal photo collection.
In any case nautilus handles them without particular effort.

Taddeo