Comment 8 for bug 602767

I think there might be a better workaround.

1) When memory is low, don't spawn a parallel thumbnail process for every executable in the folder -- do them one at a time instead. This probably accounts for most of the cases of deadlock.
2) Have the thumbnailer script determine how many other instances of itself are running, and if their total memory is too high wait until one finishes. Ideally this would happen in some sort of intelligent order, but that probably requires code in Nautilus.
3) If even one at a time is too many (eg multi-gigabyte file), then blacklist it. Rather than 100 mb I would set this at something dynamic like 1/2 the system ram.