Nemo soft crashes when viewing USB HDD (NTFS) with many files

[MinisculeTimmy]

Hi. I set up an ex-gaming desktop to be my media center, and I installed linux mint - Cinnamon edition, v 21.3. Things were working quite well until I was gonna transfer a lot of media from a USB HDD over to my internal HDD. The system slowed down to a crawl, we're talking mouse movement teleporting across the screen. The system was simply impossilbe to use. Even just viewing the files/folders of the HDD did this. After a lot of searching, there were some posts saying it could be Nemo messing things up. So I ended up installing Thunar, changed it to be my preferred file handler, and it handled it without any issue. So I have "solved" the issue, but this will probably affect others in the future as well.

Now, to a bit more detail on the issue: there were no crashes, and I could not see any sign of memleaks or CPU use going haywire. But somehow, Nemo hard throttled my PC while this folder was being viewed. I tried disabling thumbnails, didn't help. I saw one other post talking about having parenthesis in the name of folders/files being able to bug out Nemo, and a lot of the folders and files did have parenthesises. No problems with either HDD, and my computer is a high mid-end gaming rig bought in 2016. I do not have the know-how to do a deep dive into the issue, nor do I particularly want to now that I have a working solution.

Either way, as Linux Mint and Cinnamon are trying to be the user friendly version of linux, I figured it'd be good to mention this bug and my "fix". As far as I can tell, there are two fundamental issues here: 1: Nemo being able to completely throttle everything else. While this happened, i couldn't use firefox and I couldn't even close some other windows I had open at the time. And 2: Nemo not being able to handle large media libraries (maybe in NTFS drives, maybe with several terabytes of video files, maybe with lots of parenthesises in folder-/filenames). I hope this is enough info for you to reproduce the bug and fix it in Nemo.

[MinisculeTimmy]

I remembered one thing that might be relevant: I'm Norwegian, so the external USB HDD was formatted, and the folders/files inserted, by a Norwegian version of windows. I dunno if this is ultimately relevant, but it might be that it's not encoded with UTF but instead some local ISO encoding, and that causes the issue.

[spamegg]

Welcome to the Forum.

You should report it here: https://github.com/linuxmint/nemo/issues

[mikeflan]

Things were working quite well until I was gonna transfer a lot of media from a USB HDD over to my internal HDD. The system slowed down to a crawl

I think this is an aberration. I suspect if you had restarted you would not have this problem again.

I transfer USB HDD to/from my internal HDDs quite often. EXT4 to EXT4 never has a problem. I can use FreeFileSync, and while FFS is copying, also copy via Nemo other directories. Can even run CPU intensive Perl scripts - no problem.

NTFS to EXT4 almost never has a problem, but is slower. If FFS is running, I don't copy via Nemo simultaneously. But I don't hesitate to run CPU intensive Perl scripts. I did have a problem exactly as you describe about 4 months ago when doing NTFS to EXT4. It was literally a one-time thing. I think a restart was needed. I was totally surprised when it happened and it hasn't happened again. Just a fluke I think.

[MinisculeTimmy]

Things were working quite well until I was gonna transfer a lot of media from a USB HDD over to my internal HDD. The system slowed down to a crawl

I think this is an aberration. I suspect if you had restarted you would not have this problem again.

It was consistent with various settings changes and reboots. It was not a fluke.

One thing it might have been, was that I did try to copy many folders over from the external drive to the internal, and aborted the copies when the system got too slow. But any such effect should clear out after a reboot, unless Nemo does something really stupid behind the scenes.

Also, I posted here so that others who experience the same can know that the best solution if Cinnamon, with its default file manager Nemo, goes bonkers after plugging in a hard drive is to just install Thunar and check if that solves it. Another reason I wanted to post it here is that it wasn't just Nemo getting slow, it more or less killed the entire system with the extreme slowdown. At first I thought it was that I had enabled Fractional Scaling for my multi-screen setup that gave the slowdown, because I couldn't imagine the file manager doing that to the whole environment. I have no idea if this bug would be at the level of Cinnamon, or if it would go all the way to the Kernel, but I figure if I post here, this post will be searchable for others having the same experience at least.

[mikeflan]

One thing it might have been, was that I did try to copy many folders over from the external drive to the internal, and aborted the copies when the system got too slow.

That should not be a problem.

But any such effect should clear out after a reboot, unless Nemo does something really stupid behind the scenes.

It would certainly clear out after a reboot, but a reboot should not be needed. You can stop a copy, and then restart it later. But certainly be patient for the Stop to take affect.

Also, I posted here so that others who experience the same can know that the best solution if Cinnamon, with its default file manager Nemo, goes bonkers after plugging in a hard drive is to just install Thunar and check if that solves it.

You did good. Thank you for posting that. But just be aware that most people do not have the problem you are having with Nemo.

Another reason I wanted to post it here is that it wasn't just Nemo getting slow, it more or less killed the entire system with the extreme slowdown.

Valuable information. Thanks for posting that.

At first I thought it was that I had enabled Fractional Scaling for my multi-screen setup that gave the slowdown, because I couldn't imagine the file manager doing that to the whole environment.

Fractional Scaling can cause some problems, but I wouldn't expect it to affect the Nemo copy.

I have no idea if this bug would be at the level of Cinnamon, or if it would go all the way to the Kernel, but I figure if I post here, this post will be searchable for others having the same experience at least.

I don't know either. Thanks for posting that.

One thing you might want to do is type this in a terminal:

Code: Select all

inxi -Fxxxrz

Post the output to this forum in "Code" tags. The button that inserts these Code tags is marked </>, which is in the mini toolbar above the edit box where you type your reply.
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