Is this behaviour of VLC normal?

I'm experiencing similar problem with VLC player. But the difference is I'm using it often. Here is one possible (not fully proofed) workaround for this issue on Ubuntu 16.04 with Unity.

According to this answer we can test whether there is a running application desktop file named vlc or so. If there is no one we can try to kill all VLC's processes. For this purposes create an executable file, named ~/bin/vlc-killer.sh, and add the following lines as its content (here is a reference about the exported envvars):

#!/bin/bash

# Check whether the user is logged-in: if not then exit
if [[ -z "$(pgrep gnome-session -n -U $UID)" ]]; then exit; fi

# Export the current desktop session environment variables
export $(xargs -0 -a "/proc/$(pgrep gnome-session -n -U $UID)/environ")

# Test whether there is any VLC RunningApplicationsDesktopFile
/usr/bin/qdbus org.ayatana.bamf /org/ayatana/bamf/matcher \
org.ayatana.bamf.matcher.RunningApplicationsDesktopFiles | grep -q 'vlc'

# If not killall VLC processes
if [[ $? -ne 0 ]]; then /usr/bin/killall vlc; fi

Then open the user's Crontab for edit (crontab -e) and apply the following job (that will execute our script each minute) at the bottom:

* * * * * $HOME/bin/vlc-killer.sh >/dev/null 2>&1