GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 651655
Add Command Line Argument For Timeout For Thumbnailer
Last modified: 2011-06-26 11:03:57 UTC
The thumbnailer needs a command line argument to timeout after a certain amount of seconds and skip the attempt to create a thumbnail image. What happens is that a tiny amount of documents never finish, and when used with Nautilus this blocks and it spins forever until the processes are halted. If it fails within 3-4 seconds, I probably would have it move on to the next document. With hundreds of users, and millions of documents this happens to us a few times a week.
Doesn't nautilus create thumbnails in a thread? thumbnails should never block nautilus UI.
A --timeout option would be wrong; this needs to happen _automatically_, _every time_. So what really is needed here is copying the ressource limit code from totem-video-thumbnailer.
@Carlos: It doesn't block you being able to click on files, but it does block continued thumbnailing. If the first file is the one that gets locked in this manner, the rest of them never get thumbnails until the process is halted. @Christian: An automatic design is fine with us. It seems to me in experience that the thumb comes back in about 3-4 seconds, more than that and it usually is locked. You might have to account for the slower speed of stand alone computers or old laptops...this is happening on our big servers.
Created attachment 190440 [details] Here is one that I had to kill Evince was unable to finish this file in a timely manner and just continued to chew CPU for many minutes.
Fixed in git master using the code from totem. Totem has 30 seconds by default, I've used 15 seconds for evince. I've added the same command line option 'no-limit' to disable the time limit. Thanks for reporting.