gvfsd-trash causing high CPU-load when try to empty trash with thousands of files

[Jan Herold]

- Ubuntu 16.04 (Xenial Xerus) Daily Build
- AMD64
- Unity

Steps to reproduce:
- a folder with thousands of files (here about 15000 files with a overall size of 1.5 GB)
- delete files to trash
- right-click at the trash icon
- click empty trash

A dialog "Dateioperationen" shows "vorbereiten" (it's German, I think in English the dialog has the title "file operations" and shows the text "prepare").

This happens at this point:
- the dialog remains unchanged
- the process gvfsd-trash consumes up to 75% CPU, see output of top

After 30 minutes of waiting for any reaction I killed the process. The trash still contains all the files.

jan@janvm160464:~$ top

top - 20:17:24 up 31 min, 1 user, load average: 1,94, 1,97, 1,68
Tasks: 244 gesamt, 5 laufend, 239 schlafend, 0 gestoppt, 0 Zombie
%CPU(s): 85,1 be, 14,6 sy, 0,0 ni, 0,0 un, 0,0 wa, 0,0 hi, 0,3 si, 0,0 st
KiB Spch : 4037984 gesamt, 2142152 frei, 900784 belegt, 995048 Puff/Cache
KiB Swap: 0 gesamt, 0 frei, 0 belegt. 3028940 verfü Spch

  PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM ZEIT+ BEFEHL
 1760 jan 20 0 454696 24448 7840 R 69,1 0,6 20:05.18 gvfsd-trash
 1690 jan 20 0 781012 71096 36440 S 12,0 1,8 6:13.42 nautilus
 2649 jan 20 0 660088 41700 30328 S 10,3 1,0 0:04.29 gedit
  315 root 20 0 32236 2936 2500 R 3,3 0,1 1:06.21 systemd-jou+
  825 root 20 0 383184 77448 31492 S 1,3 1,9 0:15.84 Xorg
 1543 jan 20 0 1254876 189468 65780 S 1,3 4,7 0:19.38 compiz
  641 syslog 20 0 256380 3364 2684 S 1,0 0,1 0:16.81 rsyslogd
 1521 jan 20 0 567508 32776 25756 S 0,7 0,8 0:01.16 unity-panel+
 1448 jan 20 0 39728 316 12 S 0,3 0,0 0:00.13 upstart-dbu+
 2258 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0,3 0,0 0:00.23 kworker/u12+
 2695 jan 20 0 48912 3868 3136 R 0,3 0,1 0:00.01 top
    1 root 20 0 119720 5664 3780 S 0,0 0,1 0:02.72 systemd
    2 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0,0 0,0 0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 0,0 0,0 0:01.45 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root 0 -20 0 0 0 S 0,0 0,0 0:00.00 kworker/0:0H
    7 root 20 0 0 0 0 R 0,0 0,0 0:06.15 rcu_sched
    8 root 20 0 0 0 0 S 0,0 0,0 0:00.00 rcu_bh

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Mark (mark-delta-echo)]

This error persist until now.
Ubuntu 16.04
kernel: 4.4.0-38-generic #57-Ubuntu SMP Tue Sep 6 15:42:33 UTC 2016 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

In my case I reproduced the error by sending hundreds of thumbnails to the trash with the same effect.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[bb (vancouverbluesea)]

This persists - big nuisance.
1. Create an empty folder
2. Execute "touch bspl{0001..7000}.c" (simply crates 7000 empty files)
3. Move the files to trash
The system consumed 8GB RAM and 8GB SWAP - heavy usage of CPU - you can monitor with top
If I am to wait a few min it will resolve and both RAM and SWAP would go down to 1.5GB
If I want to get out of it somehow - I can killall gvfsd-trash and killall nautilus
Then go to ~/.local/share/Trash/files$ and empty the content and also
go to ~/.local/share/Trash/info$ and empty the content

I use Darktable (beautiful RAW image manipulation program). Often I have to delete thousands of files that take a few GB of space. Having a trash is desirable feature as it gives safety net for few days.
However this behaviour (consuming all the resources of the system) is more than an inconvenience - it makes the trash unusable.

If somebody knows how to workaround this please advise.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

I also noticed, that gvfsd-trash fills up memory (uses about 1 GB) if Trash contains thousands of files, see bug #1798828

[Dan Dascalescu (ddascalescu+launchpad)]

Still seeing this with an empty Trash on Ubuntu 18.

[Bradley Pearce (blitmaps)]

I am on Ubuntu 20.04 with 64GB RAM and Threadripper 32 Core, when emptying trash, with 32K files (the Flikr 30K dataset), a number of gvfsd-trash threads are spawned and the Gnome desktop freezes.

To determine it was gvfsd-trash, I switched to another tty, logged in to console, and killed the process using htop. This restored desktop functionality.

I don't know what to look for in the logs, but I can reliably reproduce the behaviour.

Steps:

1. download the flickr 30K dataset : https://www.kaggle.com/hsankesara/flickr-image-dataset
2. Extract and then open the folder containing the files (this will take about 22s in Nautilus on my workstation, as an aside this operation takes >2s in Windows Explorer),
3. Select All (This takes about 9 seconds, as an aside, this operation takes >.5 seconds in Windows Explorer).
4. Delete files (This takes a few minutes)
5. Empty trash and watch Gnome Shell and all applications hang like me??

[Humphrey van Polanen Petel (hpvpp)]

copied from Bug 1798828
--
Ubuntu LTS 16.04.6

118K files in trash
gvfs-trash consumes both CPUs and 100% of available memory

"empty trash" goes into prepare phase, but nothing appears to happen, presumably because of the large number of files, so I closed the window by clicking the <x>

rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash/*

nautilus window on trash:/// goes dark for a long time, but eventually comes back to show Trash to be empty

opening the Trash icon (on the on the launch bar) shows it to be empty and both <restore> and <empty> buttons are greyed out, but the Trash icon still shows 'filled'

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The issue is a bit similar to https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/-/issues/416 upstream, if the shell is hanging it's probably worth reporting a new bug on gitlab.gnome.org

[Humphrey van Polanen Petel (hpvpp)]

reported upstream at https://gitlab.gnome.org/GNOME/gvfs/-/issues/503