Nautilus Uses 100% CPU

Trevor Nightingale Trevor.Nightingale at sas.com
Wed May 18 15:12:38 UTC 2005


 

-----Original Message-----
From: ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com [mailto:ubuntu-users-bounces at lists.ubuntu.com] On Behalf Of ZIYAD A. M. AL-BATLY
Sent: Tuesday, May 17, 2005 22:43
To: Ubuntu Help and User Discussions
Subject: Re: Nautilus Uses 100% CPU

On Fri, 2005-05-06 at 10:57 -0400, Trevor Nightingale wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> I installed Ubuntu (Hoary Hedgehog) last night and one of the first 
> things I wanted to do was copy my photos back to my hard drive from a 
> CD.
> 
> I dragged 5 directories from my CD to a folder in my Nautilus file 
> manager and it started to copy over all 650Mb of data. The problem I 
> had was that the copying appeared slow, but more significantly, the 
> machine became unusable due to the cpu usage being 100%.
> 

Hi Trevor, and sorry for the delay.  I have read all the replies (which all focus on the DMA issue) but I have another theory.

Are you sure it's Nautilus that hugs all the CPU while copying?  When the problem happens again, run "System Monitor" and see what really use the CPU (in my theory it's "gam_server").  That's normal (in that it's not specific to you) and it *should* be fixed in Breezy.

What really happens (in a nutshell) is that "gam_server" monitors the directories that have an *open* Nautilus window(s) plus other important ones (like the Home, Desktop, /use/share/applications, /etc/xdg/menus, and more others).  To see what "gam_server" monitors, run:
        lsof -n | grep '^gam_serve.*DIR'

Ziyad.

I am pretty certain that when this occurred, I issued a "top" command and it was in fact Nautilus that was using the CPU. This issue has not occurred again, but then again I have not copied over a large number of files for a while. I do have some further data to restore and will update this list if the problem happens again.

Thanks for everyones replies.

Trevor




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