Arch Linux

ondoho

Member

Registered: 2013-04-30

Posts: 692

Website

a different thumbnailer, please (or, why is tumbler misbehaving)

Hello everybody!

[firstly, my irritation with tumbler has nothing to do with video thumbnails, which i don't need anyway.]

I like the thunar file manager. tumbler is an obvious choice, but how could i install something else?

the way i understand the process, a thumbnailer can be an independent app/daemon that puts thumbnails in ~/.thumbnails.

i came to that point because i haven't been able to find a solution to my tumbler problem for a long time now.
i never got any kind of response on xfce forums, and i also never found anybody complaining about the same thing:

tumbler goes into some kind of i/o frenzy when i delete or move a file in a folder that also contains thumbnailable files.
this goes on for up to a minute. for example, i can't watch a movie during that time because mplayer can't fill the cache.
i'm not sure if it happens _every_ time. i haven't tried to reproduce it but it's been happening for a long time. always since is started using thunar, and not only on arch. a year, maybe more.

i have a sata hd with different partitions primary and extended, 2 of which i'm using. all of them ext4.
laptop is ~5 years old, dual core, 2gb of ram. conky says tumbler doen't use too much ram or cpu, it's disk i/o.
i tried disabling anything unneeded in /etc/xdg/tumbler/tumblerrc, so it creates thumbnails only for images.
i even compiled it that way from git, but no change.

so unless somebody has an idea how to solve this, i'd really like to find alternatives.

edit:
simple openbox DE with:
extra/thunar 1.6.3-1 (xfce4) [installed]
extra/thunar-volman 0.8.0-1 (xfce4) [installed]
i uninstalled tumbler again, but i was mostly using extra/tumbler 0.1.29 and aur/tumbler-git 0.1.29.20.gafbb730-1

Last edited by ondoho (2013-10-14 19:16:29)

ondoho

Member

Registered: 2013-04-30

Posts: 692

Website

Re: a different thumbnailer, please (or, why is tumbler misbehaving)

started using pcmanfm (again).
thumbnailwise it's good now, but pcmanfm has other issues. sigh...

so, a gentle bump, please re-read my edited first post, _any_ ideas?
maybe extract thumbnailers from somewhere else (libfm from pcmanfm, or ethumb from enlightenment or...)?

or maybe the lost secret configuration options of tumbler?

edit: it's so weird i never saw anybody else mention this. some mentioned tumblers sometimes high cpu usage, maybe they got it wrong?

Last edited by ondoho (2013-10-14 19:20:54)

vadix

Member

Registered: 2013-11-23

Posts: 1

Re: a different thumbnailer, please (or, why is tumbler misbehaving)

I am also having issues with Tumbler. When one has a GIF that decompresses to several hundreds of GB of raw data, as I do, Tumbler will start decompressing and storing all of the raw video data in memory to prepare a thumbnail. I had to uninstall Tumbler because this was unacceptable.

However, I like thumbnails. Does anybody know of an alternate thumbnailing daemon? I am glad to hear pcmanfm doesn't use it, though I wouldn't be surprised if pcmanfm had the same issue; also, I like Thunar (and Ristretto, which also uses a thumbnailing daemon). I may have to see if I can fix Tumbler and submit a patch otherwise (not that the functionality is a bug, but a thumbnail only requires one frame).