Comment 23 for bug 289338

I was also hit by this bug, twice.

In both cases some kio_thumbnail processes suddenly started hogging the memory like crazy, causing massive swap activity.

The first time it happened I couldn't do much at all - the system got so unresponsive that I only managed to run 'top' in konsole which, after refreshing a few times, froze completely (even ATL+CTRL+F1 didn't work). I left the computer on for the night thinking it would settle down, but after a few hours the disk was still swapping like crazy and I couldn't do anything. A hard reboot was needed.

The second time happened today and I was quick enough to see some more details before everything froze (I didn't manage to kill the offending processes though - mem usage skyrocketed and froze the machine in literally several seconds!). There were 3 'kdeinit4: kio_thumbnail' processes, one of which consumed 3900MB VIRT and 2 others consuming over 1500MB VIRT each. I know I should have also looked at RES and/or SHR, but well... I didn't, sorry :/

The only thumbnail-related activity within the last few hours before today's freeze I can recall is copying several large video files from DVDs to hard disk. Although the directory to which I copied the files has thumbnails turned off, Dolphin still shows the thumbnail in tooltip and in the information panel on the right. This might be related, but I have closed all Dolphin windows at least 2 hours before the bug occured, so it might as well be not related at all. I also have a large (22GB) photo collection, but I haven't touched it today at all.

I have 4GB RAM + 4GB swap.
I run KDE 4.3.1 on Gentoo.
I have all thumbnailing plugins enabled (also video via MPlayerThumbs) with max file size set to 5MB.
I use Dolphin as the file manager.
If you need any additional info, please let me know.
If I encounter this bug again, I'll try to provide more useful info.