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 here.
- Issues with Tumblerd:
- Using more memory and CPU
- Preventing removable storage devices from unmounting(then, ejecting)
- External HDD
- USB Pendrive
- CD/DVD
- Usually, locking of external devices occur with Video files
$ lsof /run/media/mitesh/PHONE\ CARD COMMAND PID USER FD TYPE DEVICE SIZE/OFF NODE NAME tumblerd 1268 mitesh 9r REG 8,17 34902492 1625 /run/media/mitesh/PHONE CARD/video/abc.mp4 tumblerd 1268 mitesh 10r REG 8,17 69869584 1624 /run/media/mitesh/PHONE CARD/video/def.mp4 tumblerd 1268 mitesh 11r REG 8,17 35883924 1627 /run/media/mitesh/PHONE CARD/video/ghi.avi tumblerd 1268 mitesh 14r REG 8,17 293435929 1629 /run/media/mitesh/PHONE CARD/video/jkl/mno.flv tumblerd 1268 mitesh 15r REG 8,17 240015268 1630 /run/media/mitesh/PHONE CARD/video/jkl/pqr.flv
So, in order to get rid of this blocking process tumblerd, we can kill the tumblerd commands given by lsof, as:
$ lsof /run/media/mitesh/PHONE\ CARD/ | awk '{print $2}' | grep -v PID | xargs -L 1 kill -TERM
PS: Please replace /run/media/mitesh/PHONE\ CARD/ with the mount point of the removable device, which is not allowed to be umounted.
If we want to remove this tumblerd, we can give following command:
- Fedora
- $ sudo yum remove tumbler
- Debian/Ubuntu
- $ sudo apt-get remove tumbler
FYI – removing tumbler package under Xubuntu will also remove the the dependent xubuntu-desktop package. Which is basically 100% of the XFCE desktop environment. The end result would be a Linux without a GUI desktop. Which probably would crash on next bootup, if not sooner.
Hi Paul,
In Fedora 17, I have uninstalled the tumbler package, and my XFCE is working without any issue.
(Even, I have created this blog in XFCE after unstalling tumbler)
I have not tested it on XUbuntu, but I do not think this is going to stop XFCE as desktop.
Regards,
Mitesh
Hi Paul,
According to following forum, the tumbler is meta-package, so it would not affect XFCE desktop.
http://askubuntu.com/questions/106262/slow-folder-opening-due-to-folder-scan-in-xfce
Regards,
Mitesh
That’s not really how meta packages work. You can safely remove tumbler, it will not “result in a linux without GUI desktop.”
That probably was true for the Precise version when that was posted in February. But as of the latest Quantel version, the xubuntu-desktop package lists tumbler as a dependency. Therefore, removing tumbler requires the xubuntu-desktop package to also be removed.
Unfortuntately, I haven’t found an alternative solution yet. With Quantel, there are long sessions of disk actitivity that didn’t happen with Precise. Killing tumblerd does immediately stop the disk activity. So I have concluded disk activiry is tumberd rebuilding icons.
Hi Paul,
Thank you! for the update. You can create a Cron entry to kill tumblerd at regular intervals. Atleast this will avoid heavy disk activity by tumblerd.
Regards,
Mitesh
make a launcher in a panel : killall tumblerd
click on it when you see a creepy access to hard disk
Thanks! Memine.