Nautilus rapidly eats memory when video thumbnails are active

[azathothgr]

Binary package hint: nautilus

When nautilus is set to generate thumbnails and enters into a directory with multiple video files, it will start rapidly eating memory even if the thumbnails are all generated and shown (no running gnome-video-thumbnailer process).It will release some and start increasing again periodically, until at some point it uses it all and crashes. The system can become sluggish after a very short while, and unresponsive as memory consumption increases.

I'm using ubuntu 8.04 updated to latest,
nautilus version 1:2.22.2-0ubuntu4

I'm not sure how to go about getting a backtrace. Following instructions from https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Backtrace I got the attached output.

[azathothgr (azathothgr)]

Upon further inspection this seems to be caused by nautilus trying to regenerate the thumbnail each time, and
only happens when zoom is set to higher than 100% (150% in my case), so it must be related to : https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/204434

The weird thing is there's no gnome-video-thumbnailer process running like when a thumb is generated for the first time.
The process, whatever it actually is, takes a very long time and a lot of memory for each file, compared to when zoom is at 100%.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for your bug report. Could you try to get a valgrind log for the crash (you can follow the instructions on https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind)?

[azathothgr (azathothgr)]

Here's two valgrind logs, made with nautilus set at 100% and 150% zoom.
I've tried to let it run for a couple of minutes in each case and kill it with nautilus -q, only in the second case it took much longer as the system was crawling.

With zoom 100% the process' memory usage was stable, but at 150% it rapidly maxed out and started swapping, until it shut down and all memory was freed. There was no thumbnailer running in either case.

[M-Theory212 (liberation212)]

I'm also experiencing this bug.

Nautilus will use most of my system memory when viewing folders with video files with a zoom of 150% or more. It will always crash and restart when memory usage builds up to about 500M.
If I set the zoom back to 100% and reload the folder, memory usage will remain normal and stable.

I've attached a valgrind log.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the log has no really useful informations, do you still get the issue? could you describe how to trigger the bug on a standard installation?

[Rat (nicollier)]

Yes I still get the bug if I set the thumbnails to anything bigger then 100% like M-Theory212 describes.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

that's bug #204434 then

[azathothgr (azathothgr)]

Me too, still pretty much the same.. That's what system monitor looks like during the process (att.), 2 pixels = 1 second, and it will keep doing it for each file, occasionally not dropping or making the system very slow.

What kind of information do you need ?