gvfsd-metadata writes several terabytes of data per month (visible in gnome-system-monitor), which is obviously not good for the life expectancy of an SSD. From what I understand from
What is gvfsd-metadata? - Ask Ubuntu, it is a "write serialiser", but with no elaboration to what it actually means. Is it something like the
command queue on hard drives?
I ran this hoping to turn it off, but it didn't work:
Code:
systemctl --user mask gvfs-metadata.service
According to a 2015 thread,
How to permanently get rid of this horrible gvfs-metadata beast?, the system will work fine without it.
So what purpose does it actually serve? What stops working without it? And how to find out what exactly it is doing?
The closest I have come to figuring it out:
This lists all files changed in the last 5 minutes in the user home directory (~). It seems gvfsd writes some stuff in the
file ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home , but it is binary data, so opening it using less is not helpful.
How to monitor what gvfsd-metadata is actually doing?
