This bug is reported on Ubuntu Launchpad as https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/thunar/+bug/162448 This is on a Xubuntu 7.04 machine functioning as an LTSP server. #uname -a Linux halorentz-acss 2.6.20-16-server #2 SMP Sun Sep 23 19:57:25 UTC 2007 i686 GNU/Linux User authentication is done via an LDAP server. The /home directory is mounted over NFS from another server and users can mount their USB flash drives from the LTSP clients using LTSPFS. On rare occasions I will find that running 'ps' will hang and the terminal becomes non-responsive. If I run 'ps awx' I get a list of processes which stops just before the "offending" process. If I then list the contents of /proc I can find the offending process ID (the next process numerically) and find out who owns it. However running 'cat' on the process's /proc cmdline file will also hang. (e.g. 'cat /proc/821/cmdline' hangs and the terminal becomes non-responsive). I can run top, but if I hit "c" to list the command line details then top hangs as well. In the current case the offending process is "Thunar". I believe it was in the previous cases as well, but I don't recall for sure. Looking via top at the user's processes I can see that they have logged out, but there are a couple processes left: PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND 821 xxxxxxx 15 0 75608 13m 9356 D 0 0.2 0:01.01 Thunar 824 xxxxxxx 15 0 2680 1212 884 S 0 0.0 0:00.32 gam_server 1144 xxxxxxx 20 0 77848 1056 384 S 0 0.0 0:00.10 ltspfs 1750 xxxxxxx 25 0 1716 524 444 S 0 0.0 0:00.01 soffice 1766 xxxxxxx 15 0 203m 81m 58m D 0 1.0 0:14.87 soffice.bin 7162 xxxxxxx 15 0 0 0 0 Z 0 0.0 0:00.63 Thunar <defunct> 8770 xxxxxxx 15 0 0 0 0 Z 0 0.0 0:00.76 Thunar <defunct> In this case it seems to be process 821 that is causing the problem. I don't know how to reproduce this effect. Killing the process returns everything to normal, but it seems to take quite a while to get it to quit. I tried several times before succeeding. Running 'pkill -9 -u xxxxxxx' seemed to do the trick. It has also been noted in Xubuntu 8.04 by another reporter: Linux 2.6.24-17-generic Xubuntu 8.04 Thunar 0.9.0 Launching Thunar the same way and then running "ps aux |grep -i thunar", sometimes I get this: 1000 6186 0.0 0.6 59668 13000 ? S 11:34 0:00 Thunar --sm-client-id 117f000101000120924840700000058170002 --daemon and sometimes I get this: 1000 7509 1.0 0.5 56584 12340 ? Ss 11:52 0:00 thunar
In the next release we've added a monitor exclude for /proc and /dev, so those directories won't be monitored for file changes.