Nemo keeps freezing

[Souravgoswami]

 * Nemo version 4.8.2
 * Is issue with desktop or windowed nemo? Desktop nemo
 * Distribution - (Mint 17.2, Arch, Fedora 25, etc...) Arch. Using XFCE 4.16, but issue is persistent with 4.12, 4.14, and 4.16 (what I have tried so far).
 * Graphics hardware *and* driver used: Intel Corporation Skylake GT2 [HD Graphics 520] (rev 07), i915
 * OS: 64 bit

Issue
I am an old nemo user. I have been using Arch for like 3 years. I always see nemo freezes after some time of use, when I go to various directories that has music and photos and other files, etc. It gets slower and slower to respond as I load more and more things. After a long time, clicking on a folder and moving inside it takes 4 - 5 seconds even it's empty. Loading anything takes a huge time. I have also tried other file managers like nautilus and caja. They never had such problem.

Current solution to avoid this is to restart nemo. Which isn't always possible for the task you are doing.

Here's a preview:

Steps to reproduce
Just go to directories with thousands of files, load the thumbnails (generated ones will work, too), and you will see nemo gets slow.

[JPeisach]

Do you have any logs or syslogs of nemo?

[Souravgoswami]

I don't know how to enable logs. But I am interested in doing that and reproduce this problem.

[Fantu]

@Souravgoswami open terminal, kill the nemo process and relaunch from it for see its logs (if will show useful error/warning), it is not certain that give you something related (to this issue) in those logs with freeze (in which case it will be needed a more in-depth debugging)

I also get this failure with nemo 4.8.2 on a fresh 20.1 install. Especially, when my woman, who has a large picture collection, navigates with nemo. I couldn't reproduce the error today and it is also not showing up in system journal. Maybe there is a problem with thumbnails, which are still generated for many pictures.

[Fantu]

@dl9px your issue seems different from this issue, thumbnails generation with big number of image, big resolution and/or slow destination can cause delay, if don't cause crash is not an issue, a workaround is enable thumbnails generation only on local fs and limit the size to small flies (see in nemo preferences)

[Souravgoswami]

I don't see a lot of messages. The current messages I see are:

nemo 

** (nemo:5517): WARNING **: 17:10:54.198: Current gtk theme is not known to have nemo support (XFCE_Colour_Lite_Purple) - checking...

** (nemo:5517): WARNING **: 17:10:54.353: The theme appears to have no nemo support.  Adding some...

(nemo:5517): GLib-GObject-CRITICAL **: 17:11:12.192: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
Gtk-Message: 17:11:15.930: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:11:15.930: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:12:15.702: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"
Gtk-Message: 17:12:15.702: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module"

This is 5 minutes prior to the lags, but when it started lagging I see nothing much...

The message Gtk-Message: 17:12:34.822: Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module" is produced when I open an image with viewnior for example.

Edit:

When I close nemo, it takes a little bit of time to properly close it, the message I get is:

(nemo:5517): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 17:14:32.787: gtk_widget_destroy: assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

[Fantu]

About Failed to load module "xapp-gtk3-module" seems something is missed or wrong about xapp, probably is the first thing to try to solve.

[Souravgoswami]

Not sure why that happens though. I have xapp installed, and there are the shared objects under /usr/lib/:

$ \ls /usr/lib/libxap*
/usr/lib/libxapian.la  /usr/lib/libxapian.so.30       /usr/lib/libxapp.so    /usr/lib/libxapp.so.2.0.3
/usr/lib/libxapian.so  /usr/lib/libxapian.so.30.10.3  /usr/lib/libxapp.so.1

[Souravgoswami]

Well, so I had a file /etc/X11/xinit/xinitrc.d/80xapp-gtk3-module.sh, I edited it, and removed xapp-gtk3-module from there. I then logged out and logged back in. The warning message is gone. But nemo kept freezing. The latest log from nemo is now:

** (nemo:6049): WARNING **: 12:32:20.508: Current gtk theme is not known to have nemo support (XFCE_Colour_Lite_Purple) - checking...

** (nemo:6049): WARNING **: 12:32:20.624: The theme appears to have no nemo support.  Adding some...

** (nemo:6049): WARNING **: 12:33:29.672: Could not inhibit power management: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.gnome.SessionManager" does not exist

(nemo:6049): CinnamonDesktop-WARNING **: 12:33:57.644: Unable to create loader for mime type audio/mpeg: Unrecognised image file format

(nemo:6049): CinnamonDesktop-WARNING **: 12:33:57.645: Error creating thumbnail for recent:///39db594e1bcb86ec12ba80a95ff16c5c: Unrecognised image file format

(nemo:6049): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 12:34:25.206: gtk_widget_draw: assertion '!widget->priv->alloc_needed' failed

(nemo:6049): Gtk-CRITICAL **: 12:35:50.325: gtk_widget_destroy: assertion 'GTK_IS_WIDGET (widget)' failed

What I have seen so far:

** (nemo:6049): WARNING **: 12:32:20.508: Current gtk theme is not known to have nemo support (XFCE_Colour_Lite_Purple) - checking...

** (nemo:6049): WARNING **: 12:32:20.624: The theme appears to have no nemo support.  Adding some...

Changing the theme to something else has no effect.

Edit:
So when I ran strace -f nemo 2>&1 | grep open, I saw that multiple fonts, and icons (papirus icon theme) are loaded. So I changed the icon theme and system theme to the default, Adwaita. But no improvements.

[Fantu]

New xapp and nemo version with some fixes is out, probably is good try them (if not already done).
After, about 80xapp-gtk3-module debian for example need a change for support it correctly (see https://salsa.debian.org/cinnamon-team/xapp/-/blob/master/debian/rules), I don't know about arch (easier thing probably is check with env from terminal)

[SparkyBluefang]

The xapp-gtk3-module warning is coming from GTK2 apps, so it doesn't have anything to do with nemo.

Try disabling all icon captions. Edit -> Preferences -> Display -> Icon Captions and setting them all to None. Then kill all nemo instances (killall -9 nemo or kill -9 <pids>). I have found that nemo windows wont pick up the the preference changes if it is already misbehaving, which is why you need to kill it.

On my very large image folders, I can reproduce the problem by opening images as I scroll around. Relatively quickly (within a minute), nemo starts freezing longer and longer when the window gains focus. At least in my case, the freezing seems to be related to scrolling. If I don't scroll (or immediately scroll once upon opening a folder) I can open and close as many images as I want without freezing as long as I don't scroll again.

With the icon captions disabled, I can't reproduce the freezes (at least within a few minutes).

[Souravgoswami]

Yup @SparkyBluefang, disabling the Icon captions as you mentioned fixes the issue!!

I have kept using Nemo for hours now. Yes, it looks like the problem is w/ scrolling... Previously I wasn't able to use nemo like 5 minutes!

[okaestne]

Thanks for the workaround @SparkyBluefang (and @Souravgoswami for linking to my issue). The captions seem to cause this. I had the "Size" caption enabled. I restarted and changed the caption to "Owner". It causes the same issues. So it's not the caption type, but the caption itself.