What is gvfsd-metadata?

There are more than one way to mount different filesystems in linux.

Over /etc/fstab (works mount in background during boot) can mount filesystems on harddrives also network devices like samba, nfs for example.

Another possibility is gvfs(abbreviation for GNOME Virtual file system) is GNOME's userspace virtual filesystem designed to work with the I/O abstraction of GIO (Gnome Input/Output). is a little overview for gio

gvfs comes with "modules/backends" for trash support, SFTP, FTP, WebDAV, SMB, and local data via Udev integration, OBEX, MTP and others.

• gvfsd is the main daemon

• gvfsd-trash # is for trash://

• gvfs-mtp-volume-monitor for mtp devices

• gvfsd-metadata

  I got this bit from the manpage (man gvfsd-metadata):

  gvfsd-metadata is a daemon acting as a write serialiser to the internal gvfs metadata storage. It is autostarted by GIO clients when they make metadata changes. Read operations are done by client-side GIO code directly, and don't require the daemon to be running.

  The gvfs metadata capabilities are used by the GNOME Files file manager, and others. You can disable it.

  systemctl --user mask gvfs-metadata.service To revert it use

systemctl --user unmask gvfs-metadata.service

If you are unsure stop only for test purpose first

systemctl --user stop gvfs-metadata.service

gvfsd-metadata is used by nautilus and other gnome utilities. What is happening to you could be this problem:

• Why gvfsd-metadata process is hogging 100% of a single core for a long time

The solution:

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