How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

bornmw · 2009-07-09 19:18:14

Hi

I have 'Show thumbnails' checkbox empty in Thunar 1.0.1
I also have my ~/.thumbnails/normal as a link to /dev/null
Each time I open Thunar and try to open the /usr folder it freezes my system with hell lot of hdd activity
I can see lots of messages like this one in the log:

(Thunar:3476): Thunar-WARNING **: Failed to store thumbnail for "/usr/share/icons/Rodent/scalable/mimetypes/image-png.svg" (Error creating directory '/home/bornmw/.thumbnails/normal/': Not a directory), disabling thumbnailing

Question: is there any way that I can disable recursive thumbnailing in Thunar?
Preferably each time I try to open my /usr folder

Thanks!

bornmw · 2009-08-12 10:54:35

Oh PLEASE could someone answer my question?
There must be a way to make Thunar not to query ALL SUBFOLDERS RECURSEVELY each
time I open it to navigate my root folder!
If its sources need to be patched - could someone point me to the method where it
is doing this weird stuff? I will create a patch for Gentoo package then.

JPohlmann · 2009-08-12 13:00:37

What you describe has nothing to do with recursive thumbnailing. Thunar creates thumbnails for SVGs to load them faster in the future.
You must not link ~/.thumbnails/normal to /dev/null. It's no wonder that this breaks Thunar.

bornmw · 2009-08-13 08:08:07

Ok, it's probably not thumbnailing, but still it is recursive something.
When I open Thunar and expand the File System item it results in at least 10 sec of HDD activity which freezes Thunar.
What could it be?

Snood · 2009-08-13 11:44:25

When you see this behavior have you looked at the running processes (using top or htop or the Xfce taskmanager) to see which process or processes are using the CPU heavily?

I was seeing a lot of wonky behavior from Thunar (volume management issues, slow response, unresponsive user interface) and some occasional issues with other applications like the browser when looking at flash animations or with Xfburn suddenly wandering off into la-la land in the midst of a burn and causing me to make a coaster. Looking at htop showed me that fam was pegging the CPU. On the Debian forum I got a suggestion about installing gamin, which replaces fam as a file access monitor. All the bizarre behaviors just went away.

I don't know whether or not fam is causing your problems, but it wouldn't hurt to find out which process is actually misbehaving on your system.

bornmw · 2010-05-23 18:01:12

I have Thunar 1.0.1 and it does recursive folder scanning.
Thunar spawns lots of processes (one per folder I guess) when I open a folder.
Opening a folder with lots of sub-folders may take up to 20 seconds.
The iotop output is:

24921 be/4 bornmw 164.87 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 21.20 % Thunar --daemon
24918 be/4 bornmw 222.22 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 16.12 % Thunar --daemon
24913 be/4 bornmw 132.62 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 12.21 % Thunar --daemon
24920 be/4 bornmw 146.95 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 10.81 % Thunar --daemon
24919 be/4 bornmw 189.96 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 9.21 % Thunar --daemon
24922 be/4 bornmw 172.04 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 8.10 % Thunar --daemon
24917 be/4 bornmw 71.68 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 7.67 % Thunar --daemon
24960 be/4 bornmw 315.41 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 6.00 % Thunar --daemon
24923 be/4 bornmw 14.34 K/s 0.00 B/s 0.00 % 4.95 % Thunar --daemon

herd · 2010-05-23 20:35:38

You shouldn't be having more than one "Thunar --daemon"!
This startup should only be called once with the session start or per dbus-activation.

Perhaps your session data is garbled so that it startups as many times as your session is saved.

bornmw · 2010-09-01 14:04:00

herd wrote:

You shouldn't be having more than one "Thunar --daemon"!
This startup should only be called once with the session start or per dbus-activation.
Perhaps your session data is garbled so that it startups as many times as your session is saved.

I have just one "Thunar --daemon"
But when I click on a folder with lots of subfolders this single "Thunar --daemon" spawns lots of other "Thunar --daemon"'s
And they are doing scanning as you can see from the iotop output above.
Once they finish - they all quit and only one "Thunar --daemon" remains active.

Thanks

Pindakoe · 2010-09-01 17:24:26

I do not see such behaviour with my version (1.02), nor do I recall it from previous versions. I have just tested it by pointing it to / and my backup area (which contains many, many hardlinks). Nope -- continue to see one Thunar only. Don't know what is wrong, but your Thunar setup seems to be definely screwed up. Can you create a new user, logon as that user and see whether behaviour stays?

herd · 2010-09-01 19:29:49

I can reproduce it so far when I browse /usr/bin -- about 20 seconds, no subfolders.
Folders don't seem to be an issue, number of files seems to be relevant.
Recursion doesn't seem to be an issue either - / is browsed faster than /usr/bin here.
Apparently the daemonized thunar forks to speed up browsing - I get at maximum four instances on a dual core.

Since you use gentoo, maybe your use-flags need tweaking, especially the way exo, glib and gio-unix is built.
IIRC, there is a configure-flag in thunar itself that controls if fam or gamin are used - that may need setting, too.
Finally, mounting ext[2-4] with noatime,norelatime may speed things up a bit.

I think that browsing loads of stuff does not scale well in the complete manner that thunar tries to achieve.
Other browsers may only query the files that are visible in the current view and query the remainder when it comes into view, trading scrolling performance for startup performance. To me, this seems to be rather a decision of taste than a real bug, since you are going to lose anyway, the only question is where.

If you think this is worth pursuing, feel free file a bug in thunars bug tracker, but I don't see an easy workaround coming:
I have witnessed that thunar does not recurse.

bornmw · 2010-09-04 19:39:39

herd wrote:

I can reproduce it so far when I browse /usr/bin -- about 20 seconds, no subfolders.
...
If you think this is worth pursuing, feel free file a bug in thunars bug tracker, but I don't see an easy workaround coming:
I have witnessed that thunar does not recurse.

herd,

recurse was just my attempt to explain why would it be so long
20 seconds to open a folder for a product that claims to be "a fast and easy to use file manager" is not acceptable
number of cores is not relevant here, I've just upgraded from a single core to i3 with 4 cores (2 real+2hyperthreaded) -- the time to open folders didn't change, it depends on HDD only
and imagine how long does it take to open a USB flash mounted folders with lots of files
will try to investigate further

bornmw · 2010-09-04 19:46:36

btw, here's the list of Gentoo use flags for Thunar, I could try to disable dbus but I don't think that it's a good idea:

$ equery uses thunar
[ Searching for packages matching thunar... ]
[ Colour Code : set unset ]
[ Legend : Left column (U) - USE flags from make.conf ]
[ : Right column (I) - USE flags packages was installed with ]
[ Found these USE variables for xfce-base/thunar-1.0.2 ]
U I
+ + dbus : Enable dbus support for anything that needs it (gpsd, gnomemeeting, etc)
- - debug : Enable extra debug codepaths, like asserts and extra output. If you want to get meaningful backtraces see http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/qa/backtraces.xml
- - doc : Adds extra documentation (API, Javadoc, etc)
- - exif : Adds support for reading EXIF headers from JPEG and TIFF images
- - gnome : Adds GNOME support
+ + hal : Enable Hardware Abstraction Layer (HAL) support
+ + pcre : Adds support for Perl Compatible Regular Expressions
+ + startup-notification : Enable application startup event feedback mechanism
- - test : Workaround to pull in packages needed to run with FEATURES=test. Portage-2.1.2 handles this internally, so don't set it in make.conf/package.use anymore
- - xfce_plugins_trash : Build thunar-tpa (trash) plugin

bornmw · 2011-01-12 00:08:20

I've just removed hald from my system (and removed hal use flag from thunar)
And it seems to me that this 'recursive' behavior has gone...

Xfce Forum

Sub domains

#1 2009-07-09 19:18:14

How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#2 2009-08-12 10:54:35

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#3 2009-08-12 13:00:37

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#4 2009-08-13 08:08:07

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#5 2009-08-13 11:44:25

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#6 2010-05-23 18:01:12

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#7 2010-05-23 20:35:38

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#8 2010-09-01 14:04:00

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#9 2010-09-01 17:24:26

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#10 2010-09-01 19:29:49

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#11 2010-09-04 19:39:39

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#12 2010-09-04 19:46:36

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

#13 2011-01-12 00:08:20

Re: How to disable Thunar recursive thumbnailling?

Board footer