high cpu usage when idle

[Jamison Phillips]

If I leave nautilus open to my home folder or most any folder, it uses 25% of the cpu according to top. I've not had it open most of the time, but the cpu time is at 29:05 with a system up time of 17:30:21. That is more than twice the cpu time of Xorg and more than any other process in the system. I have deleted all bookmarks, just in case. If I navigate to a folder with only a single text document in it, the high cpu use stops.

Surely this must be a bug. What is it doing? If it is scanning something, shouldn't the results be cached and the scanning stop after a while? Does nautilus try to prefetch all folders recursively or something?

Also, all thumbnails in my Pictures folder show a clock or a black rectangle. In Ubuntu 14.04, I believe they showed thumbnail images. Could it be that it is trying a failing to load thumbnails?

Ubuntu 15.10 64 bit, fully updated
Nautilus 1:3.14.2-0ubunutu13

Running on Dell XPS 17
Memory: 15.6 GiB
Processor: Intel® Core™ i7-2670QM CPU @ 2.20GHz × 8
Graphics: GeForce GT 550M/PCIe/SSE2 (this is an Intel/Nvidia Hybrid setup running Nvidia binary driver 340.96 from nvidia-340-updates )
Drives: 2 SSDs (512 and 250GiB)

Fresh install but home partition copied from 14.04.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 15.10
Package: nautilus 1:3.14.2-0ubuntu13
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.2.0-34.39-generic 4.2.8-ckt4
Uname: Linux 4.2.0-34-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.19.1-0ubuntu5
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: Unity
Date: Sat Apr 2 17:24:04 2016
EcryptfsInUse: Yes
GsettingsChanges: b'org.gnome.nautilus.list-view' b'default-column-order' b"['name', 'size', 'type', 'date_modified', 'date_accessed', 'owner', 'group', 'permissions', 'mime_type', 'where']"
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-03-22 (11 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 15.10 "Wily Werewolf" - Release amd64 (20151021)
SourcePackage: nautilus
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Jamison Phillips (jamisoncphillips)]

I've been using this system for about a week, plenty of time for Nautilus to cache data.

[Jamison Phillips (jamisoncphillips)]

I found the cause and solution. The ~/.cache/thumbnails directory was for some unknown reason not owned by my user. I fixed that and now nautilus appears to be behaving normally. Apparently is was caught in a loop trying to update thumbnails but could not.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue you are reporting is an upstream one and it would be nice if somebody having it could send the bug to the developers of the software by following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/Upstream/GNOME. If you have done so, please tell us the number of the upstream bug (or the link), so we can add a bugwatch that will inform us about its status. Thanks in advance.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

nautilus could handle that situation better but in the end it's mostly a local issue

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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