Comment 34 for bug 204413

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.