Bug#813048: nautilus: Severe memory leak, gains about 300MB each second

[Yasha B.-K.]

Package: nautilus
Version: 3.14.1-2
Severity: important

Dear Maintainer,

On opening the Downloads folder, nautilus used up all of the CPU and the process gained about 300MB of memory every second, grinding my system to a halt in a matter of seconds until I killed the process from another tty. Naturally, this rendered nautilus unusable, which was unusual for a fresh install of Debian/GNOME to which I had migrated my files from a Fedora/KDE system a few days ago.

After some investigation, the culprit ended up being a file I had downloaded months ago, namely a full PNG map of XKCD comic 1608. Moving the file to a different directory resolved the issue.

The desired behavior is that nautilus set some computation/memory limits on thumbnailing or whatever it was doing with that file. It is not a good situation if the mere presence of a file in a directory is enough to crash a system.

As always, thanks for your work on this project, I'm having a great time with the new system.

Best,
      Yasha

-- System Information:
Debian Release: 8.3
  APT prefers stable-updates
  APT policy: (500, 'stable-updates'), (500, 'stable')
Architecture: amd64 (x86_64)

Kernel: Linux 3.16.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/4 CPU cores)
Locale: LANG=en_US.utf8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.utf8 (charmap=UTF-8)
Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash
Init: systemd (via /run/systemd/system)

Versions of packages nautilus depends on:
ii  desktop-file-utils         0.22-1
ii  gsettings-desktop-schemas  3.14.1-1
ii  gvfs                       1.22.2-1
ii  libatk1.0-0                2.14.0-1
ii  libc6                      2.19-18+deb8u2
ii  libcairo-gobject2          1.14.0-2.1
ii  libcairo2                  1.14.0-2.1
ii  libexempi3                 2.2.1-2
ii  libexif12                  0.6.21-2
ii  libgail-3-0                3.14.5-1+deb8u1
ii  libgdk-pixbuf2.0-0         2.31.1-2+deb8u4
ii  libglib2.0-0               2.42.1-1
ii  libglib2.0-data            2.42.1-1
ii  libgnome-desktop-3-10      3.14.1-1
ii  libgtk-3-0                 3.14.5-1+deb8u1
ii  libnautilus-extension1a    3.14.1-2
ii  libnotify4                 0.7.6-2
ii  libpango-1.0-0             1.36.8-3
ii  libpangocairo-1.0-0        1.36.8-3
ii  libselinux1                2.3-2
ii  libtracker-sparql-1.0-0    1.2.4-2
ii  libx11-6                   2:1.6.2-3
ii  libxml2                    2.9.1+dfsg1-5+deb8u1
ii  nautilus-data              3.14.1-2
ii  shared-mime-info           1.3-1

Versions of packages nautilus recommends:
ii  eject                      2.1.5+deb1+cvs20081104-13.1
ii  gnome-icon-theme-symbolic  3.12.0-1
ii  gnome-sushi                3.12.0-2+b1
ii  gvfs-backends              1.22.2-1
ii  librsvg2-common            2.40.5-1

Versions of packages nautilus suggests:
ii  brasero              3.11.4-1.1
ii  eog                  3.14.1-1
ii  evince [pdf-viewer]  3.14.1-2
ii  totem                3.14.0-2
ii  tracker              1.2.4-2
ii  xdg-user-dirs        0.15-2

-- no debconf information