why daemon "gvfsd" takes up so much memory
Environment
Red Hat Enterprise Linux 6
Issue
GVFSD takes up too much memory. What is the process doing actually? Can I reduce the memory it takes?
Resolution
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It will quit automatically when all gvfs mounts are unmounted. However,there is really no important state stored by gvfsd, killall -9 gvfsd can't do anything bad. (Of course, that generally will just mean its respawned as apps access gvfs shares)
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Following Red Hat Network Errata released RHBA-2012-1124
Root Cause
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GVFSD is the daemon process for GVFS, the GNOME Virtual File System (or possibly it's predecessor, GnomeVFS). It's a GNOME component that handles filesystem automounting when you're logged into the GNOME-based Ubuntu desktop. This includes devices like USB thumb drives and external HDDs, optical discs (CD/DVD), Samba or NFS or SSHFS network mounts, and other useful userspace filesystems.
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Regarding memory usage: Counting memory usage on Linux is complicated, and depending on which tool you use, and which output field you read,
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Essentially, many memory usage tools under Linux don't report the real memory in use, but instead report how much memory the process would take up if it were the only process running.
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But a lot of that memory is shared between multiple processes, gvfsd is linked to many libraries like libdbus-1 and libc and libpthread that are also used by many other processes. Shared libraries like those only need to be loaded once, and all processes that need them use the same copy in memory -- but this inflates the memory usage reported.
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