Xfce Forum

lchy667

Member

Registered: 2018-02-14

Posts: 4

Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

It took me a while to find out this was happening, but for the past few weeks I've been experiencing an issue where when I move pictures/videos, Tumblerd will nearly max out disk IO usage for extended periods of time. It slows down the computer, and I can hear my mechanical hard drive making constant 'hard drive noises', at first I didn't know what was happening and thought my hard drive was failing. Since XFCE Task Manager was showing regular CPU/Memory usage for Tumbler, I didn't figure out it was being caused by Tumblerd until I downloaded and ran iotop.

This happens if I move media files, such as moving a folder which has a video inside it, even if I'm not in any thunar window which has a 'view' of the icon if that makes sense. So if I'm on my desktop, and cut a folder which has a video inside, and then paste it somewhere else, my Disk IO goes up and things get really slow for a very long time unless I kill the tumbler process.

Another example is if I just have a 60Kb picture on my Desktop, and I click it and press delete to move it to the trash, the same thing happens, and sometimes it takes over a minute for it to 'finish' and have the picture disappear from the desktop. Killing the tumbler process makes it just finish and disappear immediately. Sometimes it disappears right after pressing delete though, but still maxes out the IO for a period of time.

Let me know if there is a better way I can debug this to figure out what the problem is, I tried starting tumbler with strace to see what was going on but it didn't work since Tumbler seems to spawn a process when it's needed, and running with strace just eventually exited the process by itself.

I am on the current version of XFCE 4.12 from Fedora 27.

Last edited by lchy667 (2018-02-14 03:39:40)

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

See if this helps: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/th … o_much_CPU

lchy667

Member

Registered: 2018-02-14

Posts: 4

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

See if this helps: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/th … o_much_CPU

It's not an issue with too much CPU/Memory it's the disk IO, meaning moving a media file, even a single picture a few kilobytes, is using up to several megabytes per second of Disk Read for minutes at a time and dramatically slowing down anything I do involving file access (eg, starting a program, opening a thunar window, loading a file).

^ Another one, I just deleted a 10Kb large picture on my Desktop and tumblerd pool used 600K/s to 3MB/s of Disk Read for about 120 seconds before completing the movement. Obviously moving files in other directories with the command line does it as expected and instantly as tumbler isn't involved.

Last edited by lchy667 (2018-02-15 01:01:03)

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

Seems like this bug. Reported in 2012, even has a bounty proposal...

lchy667

Member

Registered: 2018-02-14

Posts: 4

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

I just also noticed that this isn't even just happening when I delete or move pictures/videos. I just deleted a .torrent file for a linux netinstall iso from my desktop and I'm getting the same effect from tumbler..

Seems like this bug. Reported in 2012, even has a bounty proposal...

Hmm, that looks very similar, especially the way it is explained in the 2 most recent posts, I think it is indeed the same issue. I will work on making an account on that site to post this.

Last edited by lchy667 (2018-02-15 03:23:47)

aliov

Member

Registered: 2018-04-18

Posts: 1

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

I'm the current maintainer of tumbler, this issue has been fixed in 0.2.1 and 0.1.33 versions.

alcornoqui

Member

Registered: 2014-07-28

Posts: 832

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

@aliov

That's great! Thanks a lot for your work!

abelthorne

Member

Registered: 2020-03-02

Posts: 5

Re: Tumblerd maxing out disk IO when moving files

Hello,
I've moved to Xfce a few monthes ago on Ubuntu and have been experiencing the same issue. Currently have to kill the tumblerd process pretty often to have an usable system, which is quite annoying.

Using Xubuntu 19.10 with tumbler 0.2.7-2.

Not sure if the issue has been only partially fixed or if it has come back.

EDIT: after upgrading to 20.04, I still had the issue. I've tried to remove all the thumbnails from my cache dirs and it seems to have solved (or at least mitigated) it. Also noticed that now some thumbnails for big files (> 2 GB) are not re-generated. Have to look into this in more details but tumblerd going rogue might have to do with large thumbnails?

Last edited by abelthorne (2020-05-01 22:50:16)