gvfsd-metadata hogging 100% cpu!!!

**achron** · March 12th, 2011

Originally Posted by alecz20

I ran into the same issue a few times lately.

I had over 160 GB of free space, so I don't think that was an issue.
However, I was attempting to move about 50,000 text files from an external disk to a folder on the internal disk.

When trying to do this... nautilus became sluggish, and I was unable to open any more folders.

However, other programs ran fine (4 core CPU).

Your solution seemed to fix the problem at least temporarily.

Indeed, file space seems NOT to be the issue, I had > 380 Gigs free, but was attempting to move 90,000+ files.

Nice fix, worked like a charm.

**bc9** · April 10th, 2011

I had a similar problem per my post here:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.p...4#post10658684

...and this fix seems to work. Thanks!

**d3v1150m471c** · April 10th, 2011

it's good practice to not fill more than 85% of your harddrive. external harddrives are cheap.

**Fenris_rising** · August 15th, 2011

Well done that man!

This issue only became an issue in the past couple of days for me. Just out of curiosity I googled the gvfsd-metadata which I could see in 'top' and here I am!

As with several of you here I to was moving large quantities of data. In my case 9,525 images I was rescuing from a slide show DVD for a friend which I then had to go through to select 1 in 22 frames to get 418 single photos.

All this was dragging along because of the same issue. Fix applied and things are running at maximum efficiency as usual. I love Linux! possibly only second to this forum

regards

Fenris

**Ruaridh** · January 29th, 2012

I've just stumbled on this problem too. (O/S upgraded to 11.11, not clean install)

My issues started when moving large numbers of files (20,000 xml files), 30 Gig partition, 70% free.

The gvfsd-metadata process ran for adout 30 minutes ... but it did finish.

I'm a bit wary of killing off a process when it is running, just in case it does bad things to my filing system. I don't want to do anything that will cause even bigger problems later.

Has anyone had any knock on problems after using this?

Code:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata

Can anyone tell me what gvfsd-metadata does?

[edit]
Are there similar problems using scripts to move files or is it just a graphical interface thing?
[/edit]

R.

**JRV** · January 29th, 2012

I had this problem a while back, over a year ago.

Code:

rm -rf /home/jack/.local/share/gvfs-metadata
pkill gvfsd-metadata

Solved the problem and it has not happened again.
And it does not seem to have caused any further problems.

**anand_30** · May 4th, 2012

Originally Posted by vjkeito

I can happily confirm that the above fix does indeed rectify this issue. Hopefully this will at some point help others who come across this problem get their system running tip-top again.

The code to issue the fix is as follows:

Code:

rm -rf ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata

Thank you vjkeito,this worked.

Just installed 12.04 and had this problem of gvfs-metadata consuming all the CPU.I don't know the root of the problem but it might be because I installed 12.04 over 10.04(caelinux2011) and kept the '/home' same and in the process I had to delete many previous config folders in /home like '.gnome2' , '.wine' .
Now everything is working even smoother than a bearing

Thanks again.

**spaceshipguy** · September 22nd, 2012

Same problem. (but only 96% of CPU for me)

I was copying files to an external disk. I think the trash demon was still emptying the disk at the time.

File transfer to the disk slowed to a crawl, but the rest of the system was responsive as normal.

I killed gvfsd-metadata with system monitor, and used your code. The progress bar suddenly accelerated in a very comical way. Thanks