[Pkg-xfce-devel] Bug#478566: Bug#478566: thunar: thunar runs amok on /proc, wasting lots of CPU time

[Hilko Bengen]

Yves-Alexis Perez <corsac at debian.org> writes:

> Are you sure this is thunar process? Is your homedire on nfs or
> something?

Absolutely. grepping  through the sources for fgetsattr finds two such
calls within thunar-vfs/thunar-vfs-mime-database.c.

> I sure can't reproduce this.

Truth be told, I'm not even sure that moving files triggered this.

>> Apparently, thunar crawled /proc in a futile attempt to fetch that
>> "user.mime_type" attribute from every "file" it finds there. Because
>> thunar becomes unresponsive for lengthy periods of time, it becomes
>> quite unresponsive.

Mhm, I'd meant to write "unusable" there. The program being unusable
was the justification for my tagging the bug as "grave".

> Hmhm, I can understand that. What I fail to see is why it tries to do
> some stuff in /proc. You weren't trying to delete stuff in /proc, do
> you?

Of course not. I was moving mp3s from my home directory to an SD card.

Looking at thunar-vfs-mime-database.c shows that one could work around
this issue by not defining HAVE_FGETXATTR while configuring the
package. But upstream should really have a closer look at this.

A file manager that is used by ordinary users should stay out of
/proc, /sys, and /dev.

Cheers,
-Hilko