Thumbnailing is not cancelled when no longer needed
Here's something I observed with Nautilus 43.1 while trying to copy about 1.5 GB of JPEG files (roughly 1000 files) from a USB SD card reader. Since I originally opened the folder in grid/icons view, it started trying to generate thumbnails for it while reading the SD card. Knowing that this is slow, I decided to switch to zoomed out list view so that it would presumably stop trying to show me thumbnails I don't care about (thumbnails are useless to me on files from a removeable drive that are about to disappear from that removeable drive!)... except it didn't. It apparently creates an uninterruptible gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer
process that never gets cancelled by Nautilus:
The problem is that it's certainly massively slowing down my file move/copy operation, because it spams the poor SD card's I/O. This might also be an issue with MTP devices (if they were to have thumbnails), I imagine.
I tried:
- Switching to fully-zoomed-out listview (so that only icons show up, instead of thumbnails)
- Turning off local thumbnails entirely in the Nautilus settings
- Closing all Nautilus windows (but the Nautilus process is still going on because the copy operation is still happening)
...but no matter what, it continues with the gdk-pixbuf-thumbnailer process in two layers of "bwrap".
Instead, Nautilus should be able to cancel/interrupt thumbnailing once it has no need to show thumbnails anymore. It would save quite a lot of CPU cycles / power consumption / IO spammage.