Xfce Forum

busterzz

Member

Registered: 2024-11-15

Posts: 2

[Solved] Thunar slows to crawl when networked drive is offline

Hello! I have been a linux user for over 20 years and this is the first time I have been unable to solve my own problem by searching answers online. I am completely stumped.

This problem started occurring after I upgraded to ubuntu 24.04 (over 22.04). I have a networked drive, mounted under /mnt via /etc/fstab. This is machine for deep archives and it shuts itself down quite frequently. If this drive is offline, thunar takes around 30 seconds to open, and individual operations (clicking on a file, scrolling, anything) take around 30 seconds each. If the networked computer is online and the mount is present, then thunar works normally and the drive seems to work fine as well. This problem occurs even just browsing my home directory, far away from the missing mount. The mount is not visible in the side pane and it doesn't matter if I use tree view or places or whatever as my side pane. I know this is a problem somewhere in my personal settings since I can open thunar as root when the mount is offline and it works normally. However I don't know how to figure out what local settings are screwing things up. I'm not even sure this is an xfce problem but thunar is the only program that gives me grief when the network drive is offline.

Opening thunar from the command line doesn't return any errors on the command line. However, after waiting the 30-40 seconds for it to finally open, some messages appear in /var/log/syslog.

2024-11-15T09:57:05.810448-05:00 buster dbus-daemon[220428]: [session uid=1001 pid=220428] Activating via systemd: service name='org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1' unit='tumblerd.service' requested by ':1.395' (uid=1001 pid=311968 comm="thunar" label="unconfined")
2024-11-15T09:57:05.819762-05:00 buster systemd[220401]: Starting tumblerd.service - Thumbnailing service...
2024-11-15T09:57:05.875384-05:00 buster dbus-daemon[220428]: [session uid=1001 pid=220428] Successfully activated service 'org.freedesktop.thumbnails.Thumbnailer1'
2024-11-15T09:57:05.875689-05:00 buster systemd[220401]: Started tumblerd.service - Thumbnailing service.
2024-11-15T09:57:06.108972-05:00 buster gvfsd[223570]: smbXcli_negprot_smb1_done: No compatible protocol selected by server.
2024-11-15T09:57:06.145605-05:00 buster gvfsd[223570]: smbXcli_negprot_smb1_done: No compatible protocol selected by server.
2024-11-15T09:57:06.149809-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.150192-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.151259-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.151517-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.151711-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.151895-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.152089-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.152279-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.152560-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.153229-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.153442-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.153632-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.153816-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.153994-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.154173-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.154375-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.154565-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.154740-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.154920-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.155108-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.155286-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.155734-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: GFileInfo created without standard::content-type
2024-11-15T09:57:06.155953-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: file ../../../gio/gfileinfo.c: line 1821 (g_file_info_get_content_type): should not be reached
2024-11-15T09:57:06.156131-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_new_intern: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.156331-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_ref_string_release: assertion 'str != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.157670-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: message repeated 7 times: [ g_ref_string_release: assertion 'str != NULL' failed]
2024-11-15T09:57:06.157902-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: g_file_info_set_content_type: assertion 'content_type != NULL' failed
2024-11-15T09:57:06.527740-05:00 buster gvfsd-network[223564]: message repeated 15 times: [ g_file_info_set_content_type: assertion 'content_type != NULL' failed]

No errors appear during the time it takes to open so I have no idea what it is doing during that time and no idea where to look to find out. Probably that smb message near the beginning is important (smb1??) but I don't know how. It seems like something is trying to mount that drive for some reason and just won't take no for an answer. This used to work fine before I upgraded.

In case it matters, the mount line in fstab is:
//192.168.0.103/Rack    /mnt/Rack    cifs    vers=3.0,credentials=/etc/buster.smbpass,file_mode=0777,dir_mode=0777

Thunar version: thunar 4.18.8 (Xfce 4.18)

It seems tumbler is often implicated in slowdown problems so I blew away my ~/.cache/thumbnails directory and it didn't help. My tumbler version is
tumbler/noble,now 4.18.1-1.1build4 amd64 [installed]

I'm positive this has something to do with me upgrading my ubuntu distro rather than installing from scratch but to be honest, after 20+ years of needing to rebuild my system every 5 years I got tired of it and wanted something simpler. I'm not sure what other config files in my home directory I should be deleting. I didn't want to build my whole workspace from scratch but should I just delete my .config/xfce4 directory? Does this issue even have anything to do with xfce?

I have been banging my head against this problem for weeks and if anyone has any other suggestions of things I could try, I would be eternally grateful.

Last edited by busterzz (2024-11-17 15:03:02)

pedherall

Member

Registered: 2017-02-11

Posts: 12

Re: [Solved] Thunar slows to crawl when networked drive is offline

Maybe this helps:

https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Thunar … cold_start

busterzz

Member

Registered: 2024-11-15

Posts: 2

Re: [Solved] Thunar slows to crawl when networked drive is offline

Thanks! I tried the slow start fix and it didn't help. Thunar is still very slow starting, still hangs periodically when browsing my home directory, and is very, very, very slow trashing files. However reading all of these faqs led me to try setting the left pane to "Places" mode, and I tried clicking on all of the places to see if I could figure out if one of them was causing problems. I thought it would be Network or Devices but it turns out the only one causing problems is the Trash folder. For some reason, clicking on Trash takes almost a minute to open the folder, even if there is nothing in Trash. If there is something in Trash and I am patient enough for the directory list to load, then clicking Empty Trash hangs Thunar forever, but the files actually seem to get deleted from my ./local/share/Trash. And all of this only happens if that particular mount is offline. If the directory is mounted (under /mnt) then clicking into the Trash folder is instantaneous and everything else works as expected. I have no idea how the trash function could be interacting with the networking functions.

Added later 23 h 18 min:
After another day of working on this, I finally started trying other file managers and they all had problems with my Trash folder. Nautilus at least threw some informative errors at me. I read a bunch of stuff and then tried deleting my ~/.cache/tracker and tracker3 directories. Rebooted and suddenly everything seems to be working. I still don't know what kind of problem this was, and I hate not knowing, but it wasn't an xfce problem.