Xfce Forum

advice1010

Member

Registered: 2023-02-19

Posts: 166

Tumblerd - Okay to disable and if so how

I had some questions about Tumblerd if anyone has any information to share.

From what I have read, Tumblerd is a part of XFCE and has something to do with providing media thumbnails to applications, for example in Thunar.

This process runs in the background, and I have seen others mention that this uses about 80-120MB of RAM.
Not a huge amount but seems like kind of a lot when you consider that XFCE window manager xfwm4 users about 90MB.

1.) Other then providing thumbnails for image and video files, is this process needed for anything else?

2.) I personally turn off thumbnails in Thunar Preferences so I do not think I need Tumblerd for this process.
I have tested out "killing" the process and it does not seem to cause any issues.
I also read someone mentioning that XFCE Ristretto image viewer might also make use of this.  I do use Ristretto but I have not tested this out yet, but I do not use thumbnails in this application either.
Does anyone know if it would be okay to disable Tumblerd?

3.) After "killing" this process, it does not appear to show up in Task Manager again for the remainder of that session.
If I shut down and restart computer, then this process does come back.
It does not appear to be showing in `Session and Startup` so I am not sure what is causing this to open on its own?
Does anyone know if it is possible to completely disable?
And if so, does anyone know the best way to disable?
I have seen some mention that they fully remove/delete Tumblerd from their system.
Ideally I would like to keep it on my system if possible.
For example just in case I need to at some point view thumbnails is something like Thunar.

Thank you to anyone who reads this

ToZ

Administrator

From: Canada

Registered: 2011-06-02

Posts: 12,660

Re: Tumblerd - Okay to disable and if so how

Tumblerd will automatically start when called by an Xfce application that wants a thumbnail. If you don't need or want it, you should be able to just uninstall the package.

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advice1010

Member

Registered: 2023-02-19

Posts: 166

Re: Tumblerd - Okay to disable and if so how

@ToZ / Anyone else interested
Thank you for response.

So there is no way to just disable it?
The only way to prevent it from automatically opening is to perform an uninstall?
Because again I am not sure what programs actually require this application to function / not sure if I may at some point have the desire to use thumbnails in an application, such as Thunar.
I just had the idea that maybe I could just try renaming "tumblerd" but I just realized that this strangely does not have a command at all to do so.

Thank You

Compositoron

Member

Registered: 2020-07-24

Posts: 19

Re: Tumblerd - Okay to disable and if so how

@ToZ / Anyone else interested
So there is no way to just disable it?
The only way to prevent it from automatically opening is to perform an uninstall?
Because again I am not sure what programs actually require this application...

You need it for xfce desktop backgrounds (settings manager > desktop settings),
you can uninstall it but you will lose the ability for above and you will have to find an alternative,
you can edit /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc ; look for "Disabled=false" and to nullify anything you do not want change 'false' to 'true'.