Nautilus consuming memory and cpu

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

I have the same problem and when I open the folder all icons of my pdf documents have the clock logo as the files is saving continuosly

Though the program was slow to respond in any folder, it behaved in the same way as you describe in my photo folders.

I should report that the problem seems to have rectified itself as nautilus seems to functioning correctly for me now. At first, nautilus was having trouble every time I opened it and the bug was reproduceable (massive ram use). Now nautilus is using ~40mb of ram and I can't reproduce it. I've been allowing the software updater to do its thing and I've restarted the machine a few times, so I'm unsure when it corrected itself.

I have the problem yet somebody can help me?

When I start Nautilus in my home folder after start-up, it uses 100% cpu and greys out for +5 seconds. This used to be almost instantaneous. I've tried with a new user, and have the same problem.

I have the same problem. But when I open a folder only pdf-files have the clock logo on them and also not all (but can not see any pattern which has the logo or not).

you might want to try if one of the files it's thumbnailing creates the issue

probably my problem is Evince-thumbnailer try to go in nautilus-edit-preferences and disable the thumbnail

disabled the nautilus thumbnail and the cpu now is normal !

yes, after disabling thumbnails CPU is normal again. but not only for images it would be nice to have them ...

yeah it would be great I hope they will fix the problem, anyway now the cpu now is normal!

I resolved the problem by disabling all compiz visual effects. See tip #9 on this link:
http://www.upubuntu.com/2012/06/11-tips-to-speed-up-computers-running.html

disabling visual effects isn't the solution for me. nothing changed. when i turn on the thumbnails again CPU is going up as before.

i cant believe! - but it's the same issue I#ve had already with ver. 9.04 - now it's 12.04 and still problems with thumbnailing and nautilus..

Imprtance: Low is a shame

It seems everyone has enabled compiz. here Mee too. This bug hits me when i keep opened mitiple folders in multiple nautilus tab.
I kept it open for 2 hours and nautilus starts eating up 100% CPU

I have the same problem too and it confuses me for a few days.Each time I log in I have to kill the procedure and restart it,somehow it works ,for the cpu usage goes normal soon.But I don't want to repeat it every time I use the computer.Anyone can help?

Samarjit,

I have the same problem on my Debian (Sid/Wheezy) machines with GNOME 3.8/3.4 *without* even having compiz installed.

Same problem on Ubuntu 12.10/13.04 with Unity and GNOME 3.8/3.6 ...

Problem hits me also since upgrade on Ubuntu 12.10. Can we increase importance of this bug since nautilus randomly burns my laptop's battery.

Same problem on archlinux with gnome shell 3.8 without compiz.

I had the same problem on Ubuntu 12.04.2 LTS, after some package updates (maybe from 12.10 or 13.04):
Thumbnail preview is broken, CPU load increases with the number of previewable files in the folder viewed with nautilus.
Just found a solution/workaround here: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=683394#15
ln -s ~/.thumbnails ~/.cache/thumbnails

I just have tried it and it's working again. The only thing I did are the "normal" updates, so I do not know what fixed the problem. Ubuntu 12.10 (64-Bit), Gnome 3.6.0

The problem with my nautilus starts when I right click on file. Suddenly nautilus cpu consumption goes to 30-40%. The observable effect is continuously flickering of options in open with list after right click.

This bug also affects me. If I have a png file or pdf file in a nautilus window or on the desktop the cpu usage shoots up and the icon just shows a waiting symbol. I am not sure why this is low priority, nautilus is pretty much unusable with this bug.

Same here. High CPU usage even with Nautilus closed. Mem is Ok though. Please raise the importance of this issue.

Disabling thumbnails helps for me as well.

Same here on a Dell Latitude E5510, which I updated to 14.04 these days. I have compiz enabled.

For me, CPU consumption begins right after executing nautilus, while nautilus consumes approximately 25% to 40% of the cpu according to top. It seems as if as if all 4 threads of my dualcore cpu are in use by nautilus. Once consuming cpu, it does not stop anymore until I close nautilus.

Definately, it is unusable that way on a laptop on battery. Capacity drops from 5-6 hours to 1-2 hours just because of nautilus. Please fix this annoying bug which seemed to be active for years now.

The
sudo mv ~/.cache/thumbnails ~/.cache/thumbnails_
ln -s ~/.thumbnails ~/.cache/thumbnails
did the trick for me as well.

I have noticed that ~/.cache/thumbnails only had permissions for the root user. Plus, it just had a size of just 24kilobytes, which means it did not really contain thumbnails. Which is why nautilus did not display any on 14.04.

In the end, I can work three times as long as before on battery and, as a bonus, I even can SEE the thumbnails. By simply fixing a symlink. I just can't understand why this bug, which is fixable THAT easy still is not fixed in the packages.

Btw, I did not notice the cpu consumption of nautilus in 12.04.4, which means it seems to be a regression after updating to 14.04.

And I updated just some days ago, so I guess the transition during the update to 14.04 still is buggy.

The old directory entry was

ls -la .cache/|grep thumbnails
drwx------ 1 root root 18 Jul 15 01:40 thumbnails

which came from 12.04 or before, I guess. I can't remember to have ever touched this directory manually.

I guess this is the world's most energy consuming missing symlink ever. I expect the number of affected users to be MUCH higher than 129, because this bug was not reported automatically because of an application crash.

Think of environmental pollution, think of energy costs (approx. 30USD per year just for me. Multiply with all users coming from older ubuntu versions), think of battery consumption, noise, heat, cooling, and slowness of affected systems.

This bug MUST have a HIGH PRIORITY and can be fixed so easy.

There's a bunch of bug reports out there, also affecting other distros:
https://bugs.debian.org/731304
https://lists.debian.org/debian-user/2012/09/msg00124.html
https://ask.fedoraproject.org/en/question/33842/why-is-nautilus-using-100-of-the-cpu-on-fedora-19/

As long as nautilus can't write thumbnails (disk full) it seems to consume cpu according to https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=655421. The missing symlink could also prevent nautilus from writing thumbnails.

fedora might still be affected using gnome. I just can't test it.

I guess a symlink in the home directories needs to be fixed by the distros, not by gnome upstream. Changes in the package would not necessarily fix the symlink in the home directories.

Plus, the nautilus software can't delete the wrong ~/.cache/thumbnails directory, because this directory only has root permissions, which nautilus eventually does not have. Maybe there's a way to work around that, I don't know...

I have also same problem. Please! solve this bug. This is a Critical problem.

Same issue is here also since 2-3 weeks. I tried to ignore it, by "killall nautilus" for a long time and stopped nautilus to make thumbnails. Looking for a permanent fix for it.

Also there is a fix for this, which I am using.

Follow these (assuming you are logged in with "user" account) :

user@hostname#> sudo killall nautilus
user@hostname#> sudo nautilus &

(do add sudo while starting nautilus)

What I figured out was, in my laptop nautilus get started with "user" permissions instead of "root" on startup. This created permission issues, and thus nautilus end up taking so much resources. Running with "root" helped.
These are the comparisons, if it can help to anyone :

While running with "user"
Overall computer load : 2.4
CPU : 110%

While running with "root"
Overall computer load : 0.3
CPU : 5%