80

I've recently switched to Xubuntu and just noticed a process I've not come across before---tumblerd that was eating about 100MB. I can't find much information about this, except for this on SourceForge. Should I be concerned?

Matty
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6 Answers6

64

It's another program called tumbler that is part of the XFCE standard installation (package tumbler).

From the package description:

Tumbler is a D-Bus service for applications to request thumbnails for various URI schemes and MIME types. It is an implementation of the thumbnail management D-Bus specification described on http://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec.

Florian Diesch
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40

(followed Daenyth's suggestion and moved this from a comment to an answer)

tumblerd may be eating lots of CPU if you:

  1. are downloading some huge media file (e.g. movie) and

  2. have the download folder open in Thunar.

I'm guessing every time the file grows a tiny bit, tumblerd will check to see if it has changed, and try to remake the thumbnail. Closing the folder makes tumblerd stop.

There's a XFCE Bugzilla bug report on it, still open as of yet. See also the list of open tumblerd bugs.

(Apparantly it may even happen with completed downloads, though this may have been fixed in 12.04; I haven't confirmed it myself).

Community
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unhammer
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11

The bug is still present in Xubuntu 14.04 x64.

Disable thumbnailing for some files

You can disable the thumbnailing per media type by editing /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc (might need super-user). Detailed answer in xfce - Thunar Disable video Thumbnails only.

To disable change respective lines to Disabled=true as explained in the file:

# [TypeNameOfPlugin]
# Disabled:    Set to true to avoid loading the plugin. By default all
#              plugins are loaded.

For example disabling video file thumbnailing is achieved by:

###
# Video Thumbnailers
###

Download cover from omdbapi.com or themoviedb.org if an


API key is given. This plugin is disabled because it


sends your (private) movie names over the internet.


[CoverThumbnailer]
Disabled=true
Priority=3
Locations=~/movies
MaxFileSize=0
#APIKey=your-api-key-from-themoviedb.org


ffmpegthumbnailer plugin


[FfmpegThumbnailer]
Disabled=true
Priority=2
Locations=
MaxFileSize=0


GStreamer plugin


[GstThumbnailer]
Disabled=true
Priority=1
Locations=
MaxFileSize=0

This workaround works fine for me. Image file thumbnails are more important to me, and those work without problems.

hc_dev
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ciprianl
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8

You can edit tumbler behavior by editing /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc (destination may be different - search in /etc).

There you can set folders where can tumbler work (i set only /home), and disable some plugins (i keep only jpeg & pdf)

I think this is good compromise.

Avinash Raj
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Vitezslav Lindovsky
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5

The bug still exists in Xubuntu 12.04 x64 for me. I had a folder open with several big MPEG2 files (complete size around 30GB) in Thunar and after starting one movie file in SMPlayer my system became unusable.

top revealed tumblerd as ressource hog. I disabled thumbnails in Thunar and deinstalled the tumbler package. Things are fine now.

BTW: None of the MPEG2 files was changing size.

Eliah Kagan
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user130291
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2

Running XFCE(Ubuntu 14.04)x64 on amd5400b.

Tumbler will alternate between cpu0 & cpu1 at over 90% (as shown by gkrellm).
Kill process tumblerd and system load returns to normal.

Thanks to @ciprianl & @alvinish Raj for suggestions on fix.

user.dz
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user1969
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