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I've recently switched to Xubuntu and just noticed a process I've not come across before---tumblerd that was eating about 100MB. I can't find much information about this, except for this on SourceForge. Should I be concerned?

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1  
@unhammer tumblerd is behaving quite insanely! Based on your suggestion I close a download folder (although I'm not actually downloading anything) and the CPU is back to normal. I open it again, CPU goes up. I think I've never experienced this before. If you have any tips/suggestions, I'd appreciate it. – Chan-Ho Suh Apr 16 '12 at 7:54
    
@Chan-HoSuh This doesn't seem to be an issue any longer in the upcoming 12.04 – Matty Apr 16 '12 at 10:07
    
I hope so. I am actually running beta2...on the other hand, once I killed tumblerd, and upon opening thunar later (activating tumblerd again), everything seems ok. I'd never had tumblerd grab 98% CPU like that before though. Let's hope it was just a fluke, given its past history.... – Chan-Ho Suh Apr 16 '12 at 10:25
    
@Chan-HoSuh I actually forgot about it - I've been running it since the alpha and had surprisingly few problems. Should all be fine now. – Matty Apr 16 '12 at 14:29
    
@Matty I appreciate the response. Good to hear it. – Chan-Ho Suh Apr 17 '12 at 22:39
up vote 45 down vote accepted

It's another program called tumbler that is part of the XFCE standard installation (package tumbler).

From the package description:

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 on http://live.gnome.org/ThumbnailerSpec.

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And the damn thing can lock your USB drive... – RobinJ Aug 8 '12 at 20:19
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How do I stop it? :-/ – Bibhas Aug 20 '12 at 20:48
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I removed it. sudo apt-get remove tumbler. =) Now I need an alternate for generating thumbnails. =| – Bibhas Aug 24 '12 at 5:19
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a solution to disable thumbnails for videos or other files: askubuntu.com/a/266060/47206 – cipricus Oct 31 '14 at 0:02
    
@Bibhas To stop tumblerd: killall -HUP tumblerd. I recently had a USB drive that I couldn't eject because of tumblerd, so I just ran that command and I was able to eject it. That seemed to me like a less extreme solution than removing it altogether. – bmaupin May 23 '17 at 17:49
up vote 27 down vote

(followed Daenyth's suggestion and moved this from a comment to an answer)

tumblerd may be eating lots of CPU if you:

  1. are downloading some huge media file (e.g. movie) and

  2. have the download folder open in Thunar.

I'm guessing every time the file grows a tiny bit, tumblerd will check to see if it has changed, and try to remake the thumbnail. Closing the folder makes tumblerd stop.

There's a XFCE Bugzilla bug report on it, still open as of yet. See also the list of open tumblerd bugs.

(Apparantly it may even happen with completed downloads, though this may have been fixed in 12.04; I haven't confirmed it myself).

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5  
bug still exists on 13.04 using xfce - huge CPU if as unhammer says : am downloading huge file(videos) while download folder open in Thunar - band-aid solution is to just close Thunar – Scott Stensland Jun 14 '13 at 1:14
up vote 6 down vote

The bug is still present in Xubuntu 14.04 x64.

The workaround of editing /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc and disabling video file thumbnailing works fine for me. Image file thumbnails are more important to me, and those work without problems.

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details here: askubuntu.com/a/266060/47206 – cipricus Oct 31 '14 at 0:04
up vote 5 down vote

The bug still exists in Xubuntu 12.04 x64 for me. I had a folder open with several big MPEG2 files (complete size around 30GB) in Thunar and after starting one movie file in SMPlayer my system became unusable.

top revealed tumblerd as ressource hog. I disabled thumbnails in Thunar and deinstalled the tumbler package. Things are fine now.

BTW: None of the MPEG2 files was changing size.

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up vote 5 down vote

You can edit tumbler behavior by editing /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc (destination may be different - search in /etc).

There you can set folders where can tumbler work (i set only /home), and disable some plugins (i keep only jpeg & pdf)

I think this is good compromise.

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up vote 1 down vote

Running XFCE(Ubuntu 14.04)x64 on amd5400b.

Tumbler will alternate between cpu0 & cpu1 at over 90% (as shown by gkrellm).
Kill process tumblerd and system load returns to normal.

Thanks to @ciprianl & @alvinish Raj for suggestions on fix.

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details here: askubuntu.com/a/266060/47206 – cipricus Oct 31 '14 at 0:04

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