Friday, November 16, 2012

Stopping Tumblerd in XFCE


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

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

Hi,
I'm running ubuntu-studio to get the xfce desktop.

If I try to remove tumbler, then, the entire ubuntustudio-desktop !!

I abort the remove so this wouldnt happen.

So, how to remove tumbler?
Is there a condition assembly I can change in the source and recompile locally??

Thanks!!
Jay

mitesh.singh.jat said...

Hi,

If the tumbler is not getting removed due to dependency. Then, you can kill the tumbler related processes periodically using cron.

Add following line in your crontab:
*/5 * * * * /usr/bin/killall -q tumblerd

by using following command
$ crontab -e


Regards,
Mitesh

Anonymous said...

I've found the easiest way of stopping tumblerd is to switch on my netbook and log on. The first thing I see is usually an error message telling me tumblerd has crashed.