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 image files) and are large enough for the bug to be
noticeable, however those conditions are only ever fulfilled in practice
by videos.
** Changed in: nautilus (Ubuntu)
Status: Triaged => Confirmed
--
nautilus memory leak
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/204413
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