nautilus memory leak

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a valgrind log following the instructions at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Valgrind and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

How do I start nautilus using valgrind. If I kill the nautilus that is already running, it respawns and I cannot use the valgrind command line to start it.

You need to remove Nautilus from the session manager first. There are two ways: the easy way is typing 'nautilus -q' into a terminal. The GUI way is by going to System->Preferences->Sessions, switching over to the Current Sessions tab, finding Nautilus and removing it from the session. After this, Nautilus kill be able to be killed without automatically restarting itself via killall nautilus (or xkill, or whatever).

To prevent Nautilus from reregistering with the session manager, you can use 'nautilus --sm-disable'.

Could you please check if this is bug is the same as #187547 or not. Steps to reproduce in my post: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/187547/comments/18 (just open in Nautilus some folder with *.mkv file in it).

I get this bug as well, when I view a certain folder with a certain avi file in it. Whilst in the folder in nautilus, memory usage increases MASSIVELY and nautilus has to be quit before the machine starts swapping, which causes a hard lockup.

This bug should be labelled as a security risk because this could be used to DOS a machine.

Here is a valgrind log attachment of what happens when I trigger this nautilus bug.

Having that AVI file would be a huge help. Barring that...

==18231== definitely lost: 156 bytes in 4 blocks.
==18231== indirectly lost: 499 bytes in 29 blocks.
==18231== possibly lost: 8,801 bytes in 261 blocks.
==18231== still reachable: 399,407 bytes in 9,523 blocks.

Looks like we're not leaking that bad after all (at least, this case didn't catch this leak). Can you attempt to run your video thumbnailer over the file in valgrind and see if it causes this supposed leak? If so, then the bug is that your thumbnailer is the problem.

Just my 2 cents worth here. I have tried turning off the thumbnailer in nautilus and the memory leak persisted.

The avi file is 700mb, where would you like me to upload it?

It is definately a HUGE memory leak. As soon as I view that folder, nautilus memory usage starts to ramp up at about 100MB/s until I am using about 90% of available ram (1GB), with a footprint of at least 600MB and then valgrind stops nautilus running.

What is the default video thumbnailer that nautilus uses in ubuntu hardy beta?

The command(s) using the huge amount of memory is (are) "nautilus --sm-config-prefix /nautilus-94S7L4 --sm-client-id 117f000101000120342897800000058440002 --screen 0 --load-session /home/sam/.nautilus/saved-session-S8VP6T"

It's unrealistic to upload a 700MB video, sadly.

The default thumbnailer for video is accessible via gnome-video-thumbnailer.

gnome-video-thumbnailer makes a thumbnail of the video perfectly, without any problems when run from a terminal by itself. I can upload the video to rapidshare or similar if you like, this is a horrible bug that could completely bring down someone's computer and I'd like to help squash it in any way I can.

I confirm the same leak at any *.mkv (media in matroska container) file of decent size. Small files do not cause noticeable leak, seems it's somehow depend on file size.

Cannot detect this bug at any *.avi file, though.

Please confirm if this bug is a duplicate of https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/nautilus/+bug/187547 (or vice versa).

It looks as though it might be a duplicate of that bug. It's hard to tell because the process triggering the crash in nautilus seems to differ from person to person.

I also recommend that this bug be labelled a security flaw, specifically a DOS vulnerability, because any unprivileged user could bring the computer to a grinding halt simply by exploiting this bug.

I get a very similar problem when opening directories containing a large number of files but no media files. For example, opening /user/lib with nautilus can consume 50% of the processing power on my intel duo core2 for a sustained period of time and drain any where from 600mb to 1.2gb of memory. The memory drain has yet to consume all 3 gigs of my ram and completely crash my system, but nautilus does freeze and need to be restarted. cheers, phil.

I have the same problem, since a mkv file is present. The memory usage ramps up until around 750 Mb, and then is reduced down to 100 Mb, and the cycle repeats...

Hello

I'm having the exact same problem as Sam Davies, right after opening a folder with a avi file in it, the memory usage for nautilus goes to the roof. And I don't know if is the thumbnailer, because the second time I enter the folder (the thumbnail was alredy on cached) and the same thing happened.

I attached a screenshot of this problem happening on my computer, which by the way is:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
1GB Ram
Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04

Confirm same bug. Everytime i open a folder with videos on it, viewed as icons (not in list) , hard disk spins, cpu goes 100% and it starts to eat memory and and swap.

I've attached an screenshot of my htop running when it occurs (showing the beginning of the problem in the screen attached).

If you have your video folder set to a zoom of 150% or more, try to set it back to 100% and then reload the folder.
Do you still have excessive memory usage after this?

M-Theory212: Yeap, at 100% zoom or less, this problem doesn't happen to me... I've tested it in two different machines with completly different configurations, only Hardy Heron in common with all the updates so far...

To anyone experiencing this: Can you try to get another Valgrind log, this time using Massif, the heap profiler (http://valgrind.org/docs/manual/ms-manual.html)? It could be that we're not leaking, just allocating too much/in a loop, or that we're leaking references in the thumbnailing code somehow.

One of the attached logs on one of the related bugs had allocated ~500MB in 2M allocations, meaning that the average allocation size is quite small, so it's probably something very subtle that's going on, maybe a race or a livelock in the thumbnailing code introduced since the GIO merge (maybe leaking a URI reference? Seems to fit the 250ish-byte theory.) Either way, without being able to see where this is coming from we're completely blind to the issue, a Massif log captured during the issue would help a great deal.

Also helpful: are you all using dual or many-core systems?

A. Walton, as requested, I ran nautilus under valgrind using the massif heap profiler. I ran this command line after executing "nautilus -q":

$ valgrind --tool=massif nautilus

This was the output on the shell:

==18680== Massif, a heap profiler.
==18680== Copyright (C) 2003-2007, and GNU GPL'd, by Nicholas Nethercote
==18680== Using LibVEX rev 1804, a library for dynamic binary translation.
==18680== Copyright (C) 2004-2007, and GNU GPL'd, by OpenWorks LLP.
==18680== Using valgrind-3.3.0-Debian, a dynamic binary instrumentation framework.
==18680== Copyright (C) 2000-2007, and GNU GPL'd, by Julian Seward et al.
==18680== For more details, rerun with: -v
==18680==
seahorse nautilus module initialized
Initializing nautilus-share extension

** (nautilus:18680): WARNING **: Unable to add monitor: Não suportado

GLib-ERROR **: /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.16.3/glib/gmem.c:175: failed to allocate 1073741824 bytes
aborting...
==18680==
Finalizado

The last word means "Finished", meaning (maybe i don't know) that the process was killed (not by me). My PC almost locked down because this time nautilus eat up all my RAM and little over 50% of swap.

The valgrind file output is attached.

By the way, I have a 701MB .avi file on my home folder. My current PC configuration:

Intel(R) Pentium(R) 4 CPU 2.40GHz
1232MB RAM
40GB IDE Disk

When I get home, I'll run valgrind with another PC configuration

whenever i right click to some .mkv an error message comes out "Create properties window. You can stop this operation by clicking cancel" and when i check Valgrind i get something like this:
==30789== LEAK SUMMARY:
==30789== definitely lost: 59,476 bytes in 269 blocks.
==30789== indirectly lost: 79,448 bytes in 2,490 blocks.
==30789== possibly lost: 20,538 bytes in 463 blocks.
==30789== still reachable: 15,551,514 bytes in 165,097 blocks.
==30789== suppressed: 0 bytes in 0 blocks.

My memory usage to nautilus goes up 20 mb every time i get these errors.

the logs are not really useful. does anybody still get the issue? do you use sudo to run nautilus? could you describe how to trigger the bug?

We are closing this bug report as it lacks the information, described in the previous comments, we need to investigate the problem further. However, please reopen it if you can give us the missing information and don't hesitate to submit bug reports in the future.

I am still having this bug, at least on an updated 8.04 (not tryed intrepid). Same problem when nautilus run as a regular user or under sudo. How to reproduce:
1) crate a new directory and copy a 700 MB video file in it;
2) select a zoom factor > 100% (no matter if viewed as icons or not);
3) launch 'top' and see the nautilus process increasing its memory use;
4) select a zoom factor <= 100% and presh the refresh button;
5) memory use drops.

Fabio's observation confirmed.
No need to copy any video files, just open a dir containing one.

Running up-to-date intrepid
I had to enable thumbnails to this to happen

 PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
 6044 xxx 20 0 607m 457m 15m R 13.3 30.2 0:35.45 nautilus

Perhaps my problem is different. However, if I open my /usr/lib folder (with no video files in it) Nautilus will not display the folder contents for minutes and maybe longer. It has gotten up to 1.5GB on my machine while I was waiting for it to display.

Perhaps it happens on any large folder.

James

I think Its worth mentioning the following:
1- This problem happens only on Ubuntu, I've used fedora 7,8,9 and 10 for two years and never saw this issue (with or without video files); However, it showed up once every month or so on my other Ubuntu machines. So the problem probably resides somewhere in the difference between the fedora and Ubuntu's.

2- This problem happened many times by just letting Ubuntu run while viewing the desktop; the desktop contained only encrypted files (encrypted files from other appliances that I use)

I wish I can help more...

Ubuntu 8.10 and the two versions before it.
Nautilus 1:2.24.1-0ubuntu1

the issue is not likely ubuntu specific there is no ubuntu change that would create such issue, could be that you have different configuration or codec installed on fedora though or that you just didn't run into it there yet

I have had all the same issues, I hae noticed that the gnome-video-thumbnailer is what runs off with all of the resources.........This is a directory that I had restored from a backup before i was messsing with the partitons earlier, and this was the first time i had nautilus go to that directory..........is it possible that it is just over extending itself trying to read all of the new video files and create thumbs?, eventually It has calmed down as I moved some of the files to a seperate directory, although I had to shutdown the first time, and it was definately taking up all cpu, and stole like 200-300 mb of ram at a time?

I can confirm this bug in intrepid.
I am using amd athlon 2500+ on nvidia chipset MSI board with nvidia 6800GS video card.
Almost every movie folder gives me this problem. I have been having this problem for the last
couple months (since intrepid I guess).

Nautilus goes memory crazy for a while and my harddisk runs continuously for a while.
Then everything goes back to normal. I have thumbnails at %150. Nautilus runs in this crazy
mode for about a minute before it goes back to normal. At %100 there are no problems.

During this crazy state, changing the thumbnail size doesn't help, but I can click the UP button
to leave the directory with the movie and everything immediately goes back to normal.

Let me know if there are any ways I can contribute more information. However, I am quite the
newbie in Linux debugging, so you must tell me the exact steps to take.

I have a similar problem. After some normal use, nautilus eats up 300MB RAM, with the only remedy being restarting nautilus. I have opened no folder containing videos, so it isn't the video thumbnailer, however, there are lots of pdfs which get thumbnailed.

This problem only appeared recently for me. I'm not sure it is related, but I've started using compiz at about the same time. I don't remember seeing this bug when I used metacity. It may be a path to explore (however, I don't have time for it right now).

There's a directory on my main drive with about 3,100 short video clips in it, averaging 7 or 8 megabytes. I had it open in Nautilus on two machines, the local one running Hardy with 1GB RAM and 1GB swap, and the other one, running Intrepid with 1.5GB RAM and 2GB swap, had it mounted via Samba.

After about 3 days of disuse with both machines logged in and that folder open in Nautilus, I came into the office tonight to discover the 1GB machine completely unresponsive (no video, no network, no response to caps lock/num lock keypresses), while the 1.5GB machine had a nautilus process using 2.5GB of VM and swapping constantly with a load average in the teens. I kicked the dead one and did an orderly reboot of the other. Sure enough, syslog in the 1GB machine showed one process after another being killed by oom-killer (with nautilus apparently surviving) until syslogd stopped working.

I also notice that in my nautilus preferences, under the Preview tab, Other Previewable Files category, "Show Thumbnails" is set to local files only and only for files under 5MB. But it continued to thumbnail all my videos regardless of size and location, on both machines.

My workaround was to sudo mv /usr/bin/gnome-video-thumbnailer /usr/bin/gnome-video-thumbnailer-disabled and just not use video thumbnails at all. This folder takes so long to load that I have no intention of closing it between sessions, nor do I make use of the thumbnails since I use nautilus exclusively in List mode.

I hope all of this is useful to other people having problems with gnome-video-thumbnailer, and I will follow up after a few days of uptime as to whether disabling gnome-video-thumbnailer has also killed this nautilus memory leak. I'll gladly help debug if I can, but in my case the memory leak took days to impact performance.

After 4 days of having Nautilus open to that same folder on both machines with gnome-video-thumbnailer forcibly disabled, Nautilus is still only using 100MB on one machine and 88MB on the other. So lacking any other differentiating factor that I know of, I'm inclined to say the memory leak was caused by an interaction between nautilus and gnome-video-thumbnailer.

same problem for me, huge problem...I go into my video folder and nautilus instantly starts chewing up my memory. Within 10 seconds it's frozen (eats up 2 gigs of RAM). Thanks for the hard work

In my testing this bug has nothing to do with the thumb-nailing of media files. To reproduce the bug create a folder on your desktop called bug, now inside the bug folder create a new folder called empty. Open System Monitor so that you can watch the memory usage of nautilus. Now with nautlus go into the empty folder once inside the empty folder go one dirctory up, then go back into the empty folder, do this process about 100 times and you will see that the memory usage of nautilus slowly starts growing.

With regards to thumb-nailing, if one has lots of media files in a folder and one goes into that folder, the problem that is seen with memory increase just by going into a empty folder is increased and the problem shows it's self more easily, but the problem does exist even if one does not use any media files.

I have tested this on intrepid (amd64) and jaunty (32-bit beta) with all current updates installed, problem still exists.
Hardware ranges from desktop system (intel quad core), laptop (intel dual core) and netbook (intel atom)

File systems range from ext2 (netbook) ext3 (desktop) ext4 (laptop)

I think the bug is a huge problem, because if one never switches off your system, just by browsing around one's computer on a long enough time line nautilus will consume a huge amout of ram.

Deon Spengler: very nice finding. I can confirm following your instructions indeed leads to a memory leak. It may not be the same as we have experienced now and then, but it is in any cases, a very serious one. Could someone forward that upstream?

This problem still persists for folders that has video inside as well. I have a folder that has 5 150 meg avi files, within 5 minutes of opening it nautilus is grayed out and my memory is used up. This is without going in and out of folders or anything like that, I have a direct link to the folder, I go into it, and watch my memory get used. I am using Intrepid, I cannot verify if the problem persists in Jaunty as I tried Jaunty out for a few days and it was just too buggy to be functional for me. Is this problem going to be assigned a priority at some point? It's been around quite awhile. Thanks!

nevermind I see that it is confirmed and set up to medium priority! Thanks a lot for the hard work. I'm not sure how the problem is going to be pinpointed as different people are seeing the leak in different scenarios. Let me know if I can add anything else to help out

In my case, when I change the icon theme from Human to a custom one, every time I open a folder in Nautilus, the memory used increase about 20-30MB. I'm using Ubuntu 9.04.

I have a question, why when I quit nautilus, the memory remains?

 Deon Spengler wrote on 2009-04-09:

"In my testing this bug has nothing to do with the thumb-nailing of media files. To reproduce the bug create a folder on your desktop called bug, now inside the bug folder create a new folder called empty. Open System Monitor so that you can watch the memory usage of nautilus. Now with nautlus go into the empty folder once inside the empty folder go one dirctory up, then go back into the empty folder, do this process about 100 times and you will see that the memory usage of nautilus slowly starts growing."

Maybe the above is also related to this:

I recently used Nautilus to move a folder containing a large number of subfolders and files (~80,000 files, ~9Gb) to another disc. After completing the move (took about 20 minutes), Nautilus had consumed 190Mb of RAM, and didn't want to release it!

8.1 Intrepid (all updates)
GNOME 2.24.1
Nautilus 2.24.1
Intel P4 512Mb

I have the problem with an uptodate karmic (amd64),
when I open a folder with big media files (avi or mkv) and single click to one of them,
then the memory usage of nautilus goes to 1GiB memory usage and stops there, after that nautilus friezed, and consumes 100% cpu.

I can confirm this bug and reliably reproduce it, after suffering from it for a long time seemingly randomly without understanding what caused it, and finally noticing a strange coincidence tonight (see below).

Also I can maybe tell why and how it happens by guesswork ...

=== Conditions to reproduce the bug ===
* nautilus in icon view, with thumbnails enabled,
* any video file for which nautilus has had a thumbnail generated

At this step the tentative conclusion is that the bug is related to video thumbnailing support, however the totem-video-thumbnailer program seems fine, and is not executed by nautilus when the bug happen anyway.

=== First method to trigger the bug ===
* Select the video file in a nautilus window or on the desktop
Symptoms:
* lots of disk accesses happen
* meanwhile nautilus' resident memory progressively increase by *exactly* the size of the video file, as reported by gnome-system-monitor (this is usually barely noticeable with small video files but gets problematic with 4GB ones ...)
* it then frees all the memory allocated during the previous step

* changing folder or closing the nautilus window during step 2 is generally enough to interrupt the process and make it restore the allocated memory prematurely.

That leads me to the tentative conclusion that nautilus is copying the file entirely in its memory, to do stuff with it. The question remaining is then what could that stuff be ?

=== Second method to trigger the bug ===
* increase the zoom level to over 150% (ie from 200% upward)
Symptoms:
* same as with first method, seemingly with each video file in the folder one at a time when there is more than one present

A few considerations:
* Thumbnails generated by totem-video-thumbnailer (the png files in ~/.thumbnails) are all 128px wide (the 'normal' size subfolder);
* at 100% zoom level, they are displayed by nautilus at width 96px, at 150% it's 128px wide.

* Nautilus does thumbnailing of image files internally (without calling an external helper like it does for videos), and also store 128px wide thumbnails for image files;
* when needed, ie when zoom level is over 150%, it automatically rereads image files to provide non-blurry thumbnails with higher resolutions, which it seems to only keep in memory (these do not end in ~/.thumbnails).

=== Conclusion: how the bug happen (plausibly) ===
* Nautilus has a routine for regenerating thumbnails of higher resolutions when zooming in, which for some reason is also called when simply selecting a file (as a preemptive step maybe ?)
* This routine works by copying all the content of the file to be thumbnailed into memory (which seems unavoidable for an *image* file)
*** the bug is here *** That routine is called by nautilus for all files which have a thumbnail, without checking the filetype first (silly nautilus)
* As a consequence, the entire video file is copied into memory, before nautilus (or maybe gdk-image-loader or whatever it's called) realize it doesn't know what to do with it and frees the memory.

As an aside this means one could theoretically reproduce this bug with files of any type, as long as they are thumbnailed (and not directly by nautilus like imag...

Something that I noticed with my up todate karmic is that when I do single click to select a 350MB video file nautilus memory will increase by +- 350MB for about 2 seconds then it's memory usage will drop back down again to around 20MB. How ever if I select a 1.4GB video file nautilus memory will increase by about 1.4GB and then crash.

Thank you for your work there. Do you get the issue on any video? Could you try with the option to preview audio files on mouseover not enabled too?

upstream found an issue and worked on a change to fix it now

Yes, on any video (but like I said, the symptoms are hard to notice and inconsequential on small videos, and I hadn't until yesterday)
Also the symptoms happen whether audio file preview is enabled or not.

(By the way, what do 'confirmed' and triaged 'mean' ? since it looks like I've done a mistake there)

Correction : on any video *with a thumbnail*. If thumbnailing failed and nautilus show the standard video icon, the bug does not happen.

"Confirmed" only means that several persons are encountering the bug. "Triaged" means that the developper has gathered enough informations to know what is causing this bug, and can now try to fix it.

This bug was fixed in the package nautilus - 1:2.28.0-0ubuntu1

---------------
nautilus (1:2.28.0-0ubuntu1) karmic; urgency=low

  * New upstream version:
    - Translation updates
    - Don't load non-images for thumbnailing when zoomed (lp: #204413)
    - Made desktop window a native X window for nicer redrawing
    - Fix leaks
  * debian/patches/12_list-view_expand.patch,
    debian/patches/90_relibtoolize.patch:
    - new version update

 -- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Mon, 21 Sep 2009 17:24:44 +0200

this bug doesnt seem to be fixed on my recent karmic ubuntu system.
nautilus version: 1:2.28.1-0ubuntu1

right clicking on a video and selecting properties opens a window 'Creating properties window'. Even if the cancel button is pressed, still memory is allocated more and more until no memory is available.

an interesting thing is, that also the totem movie player allocates more and more memory without playing the video.
(the video is a mpeg stream and was recorded via me-tv from a dvb-s device).

maybe there's a problem in the gstreamer package?

how can i help to find a solution for this bug?

i found the root of the problem:

after removing the package gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad, i was able to view the properties window in nautilus as it should be.

the totem player now complains about a missing codec and suggests to install gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad but there's no memory leakage anymore.

thus the problem seems to be in the gstreamer0.10-plugins-bad package

I installed Maverick a week ago and I'm noticing a memory leak. I've seen it get as high as 2.5GB. I just killed it at 1.2GB.

and now we are in 2011 and the memory leak still persists !
when open nautilus with many files ( media or not ) , it eat my all RAM .

Please file a different bug as the cause of this particular memory leak has been fixed.

On 6 April 2011 07:37, AH HA <email address hidden> wrote:

> and now we are in 2011 and the memory leak still persists !
> when open nautilus with many files ( media or not ) , it eat my all RAM .
>

When I reported my problem, I was using Fedora 10, now on 14 and never had
problem after F12.

Hope above helps.

Good day