Hullo All,
I'm running fc8 and gnome. Lately I have been generating some large-ish TIFF files (40-50 MB). I have noticed that sometimes they aren't being thumbnailed, but the real problem is that if I try to access the file properties, the properties window opens and then immediately disappears taking the whole desktop with it. The desktop is reconstructed a few seconds later, but not as it was. All filer directory windows have to be re-opened.
To check file size etc I have to alter the directory window 'view' to shows items as 'list' rather than as 'icons'.
I'm not really sure what actual application is responsible, but suspect it is Nautilus, and the version I have is 2.20.0.
Is this problem known, and if so is there a fix?

Cheers,

Anything in the (Xorg?) logs? And if you open your file manager from a terminal and let it crash, do errors show in the terminal? Other file managers? Other DEs?

Creating a thumbnail for a 50MB TIFF file can take a while. If you have more of these, then Nautilus can be pushed to it's limits. I guess it is not stress-tested for such conditions. Note also that TIFF isn't so common anymore as it was 10-15 years ago, so it doesn't show up often on testing schedules. Not necessarily a Nautilus problem, can also be caused by the TIFF library code that is in use.

Maybe run a test by converting one such image to a PNG or JPG file (adjust compression rate so that the file size remains similar to the TIFF version) and see if Nautilus still crashes. If it doesn't crash then it's clear at least that the problem is with libtiff.

Other than that: I have found thumbnails for directory items pretty, but useless (most often). Even within Gnome I prefer Konqueror - more simple, more efficient.

Server issues

OK, I made a PNG version of the file. The TIFF is 44.2 MB and crashes the file manager when the 'properties' window is opened. The PNG is 44.3 MB and the properties window opens OK.
I will see if there is an update to libtiff and if that has any effect.
Thanks for your help.

Cheers,

Nothing in the Xorg logs.
I started up in Xfce, and it can report the 'properties' of the TIFF file without any trouble.

Further to my recent response re the ques about different image file formats , posted by Marquardl, I have checked the version of Libtiff I am running and it is the latest, so not much joy there.
As Xfce doesn't have any trouble it would appear to point to a problem with gnome/nautilis.

Not sure where to go from here...other suggestions welcome.

Cheers,

What if you open your file manager from inside a terminal and let it crash, do that errors / clues show in the terminal?

I'm not sure how one would do that. The file manager is already running when I have access to a terminal. Do you mean start it again, have a second one running? What command would I use to do that?

Cheers,

I finally figured just what you meant and tried that. There is nothing written to the terminal window when Nautilus crashes.

Cheers,

IIGC this could apply to you: http://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugreport.cgi?bug=443701, at least one person confirmed an upgrade fixed things. If it doesn't apply to you then should submit a ticket to Fedora's bugtracker. First check if the last crash generated a "~/nautilus-debug-log.txt" logfile: this should be added to your bugreport. If there's no such file then create a "~/nautilus-debug-log.conf" and fill with:
then restart Nautilus, make it crash, then add the logfile to your bugreport. If there's still no crash report you can install the bug-buddy package which should intercept crashes in GNOME or else run 'gdb' to print a stack trace, but I'd open up a bugtrack ticket before doing that so they can explain to you what they would like to see.

This could still be a problem with libtiff, as the library doesn't get updated a lot recently (it is not a trendy format nowadays). The code is old and recent GCC versions tend to be very picky when it comes to certain types of allocations and freeing memory - so it compiles fine, but can cause segmentation faults at runtime.

The fact that XFCE handles it OK, while Nautilus crashes seems to indicate that this could be some memory leak, either in libtiff or Nautilus, or maybe even both in some weird combination.

It also indicates that this is clearly a problem within the source code, so it's not something you can adjust or fix on a user level.

Bye,
M

Thanks for that advice.
the TIFF format is one that is quite useful these days as digital images in raw format can be converted to TIFF for input to apps such as Gimp, Hugin etc. There are so many raw formats that these apps don't handle.
It sounds like I had better follow the previous advice and submit a bug report.

Cheers,