Tumbler is driving me CRAZY... how can I remove it?

Every single time I cut, copy, paste or even rename a folder, tumblerd goes crazy, uses tons of CPU and my HDD starts making a really loud and irritating grinding noise that just doesn't stop.

Even if I move a folder with 1 single file inside it.... tumblerd goes absolutely nuts for ages.

I have to constantly open a terminal and killall tumblerd every time I do anything, but I'm really sick and tired of it now. It's come to the point where I dread moving or renaming anything on my system because of the constant tumblerd grinding.

The problem is it cant even be removed without removing vital components along with it.

Searching google I can see lots of posts, every year, multiple times a year, for the past 8 years... and this is still and absolute nightmare of a problem.

Is there any way to stop this god-awful thing?

I'm on Xubuntu 20.04

Solution 1:

You can disable the thumbnailer but this will disable thumbnail previews in Thunar. Anyhow, the solution is to change every instance of Disabled=false to Disabled=true in your /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc. You can run the following command to do this automatically.

sudo sed -i 's/false/true/g'

Log out and log back in or kill Tumblerd and/or Tumbler to apply the changes.

You can also try fine tuning this file by enabling some (Disabled=false) and disabling others (Disabled=true) if you want to keep some of the thumbnail capabilities.

Just edit the file with your favorite text editor using sudo like in the following example which uses nano:

sudo nano /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumbler.rc

To save your changes in nano, press CTRL+o and then press CTRL+x to exit nano.

Source: How to Fix Excessive CPU Usage by Process Tumblerd on XFCE Desktop — askmeaboutlinux.com

Additionally, the problem you describe with the disk paging or "thrashing" is often an indication that your swap space is too small or that swappiness is set too low on a system with limited resources. It is often recommended by people to disable swap to increase performance but on a system with limited resources, swap actually increases performance.

If you haven't made any changes to swappiness, this probably isn't the issue. If you have made changes to swappiness, this may be something to look into if the changes above (disabling Tumblerd) don't seem to help.

Solution 2:

After many months of putting up with this service thrashing my HDD every time I move or rename anything I've been able to remove it. Simply:

sudo apt remove tumbler (note this also prompts that ubuntu-desktop will be removed, however after noticing this post I decided to give it a try and after a reboot I can confirm Xubuntu 20.04.2 is running as normal and files and folders can be moved or renamed without the horrendous HDD thrashing)

Side note: I guess people with SSD's may not notice this problem but the damage that it will be doing to their drives would likely be significant.