What is gvfsd-metadata actually good for?

[HyperBear]

I have noticed in the task manager system monitor that gvfsd-metadata writes hundreds of gigabytes per month, which is not good for an SSD in the long term.

I decided to kill the process and everything kept working just fine.

I couldn't find any useful information online on what it is actually good for. This AskUbuntu discussion suggests it is a "write serializer", but with no further elaboration.

Does anyone know what it is actually good for? What doesn't work without it?

[spamegg]

I think it stands for "Gnome (or Gobject maybe?) virtual file system daemon)

Your desktop environment, Cinnamon and file manager Nemo depend on it:

Code: Select all

❯ apt remove --simulate gvfs
NOTA: ¡Esto es sólo una simulación!
      apt necesita privilegios de administrador para la ejecución real.
      Tenga también en cuenta que se han desactivado los bloqueos,
      ¡no dependa la situación real actual de la relevancia de esto!
Leyendo lista de paquetes... Hecho
Creando árbol de dependencias... Hecho
Leyendo la información de estado... Hecho
Los paquetes indicados a continuación se instalaron de forma automática y ya no son necesarios.
  gir1.2-gck-1 gir1.2-gcr-3
Utilice «apt autoremove» para eliminarlos.
Los siguientes paquetes se ELIMINARÁN:
  blueman cinnamon cinnamon-dbg gvfs gvfs-backends gvfs-fuse mint-meta-cinnamon nemo
  nemo-dbg nemo-fileroller nemo-preview
0 actualizados, 0 nuevos se instalarán, 11 para eliminar y 0 no actualizados.
Remv blueman [2.4.4+mint2+xia]
Remv cinnamon-dbg [6.4.8+xia]
Remv mint-meta-cinnamon [2023.08.28+mint21.2]
Remv cinnamon [6.4.8+xia]
Remv nemo-fileroller [6.4.0+xia]
Remv nemo-dbg [6.4.5+xia]
Remv nemo [6.4.5+xia] [nemo-preview:amd64 ]
Remv gvfs-backends [1.54.0-1ubuntu2] [nemo-preview:amd64 ]
Remv gvfs [1.54.0-1ubuntu2] [nemo-preview:amd64 gvfs-fuse:amd64 ]
Remv gvfs-fuse [1.54.0-1ubuntu2] [nemo-preview:amd64 ]
Remv nemo-preview [6.4.0+xia]

So I think they are background processes for file indexing and various other low-level functions.

But it's concerning that it wrote gigabytes per month.
Today, gvfsd-metadata only wrote 2.4MB for me.

[HyperBear]

Your desktop environment, Cinnamon and file manager Nemo depend on it

After I killed it, Cinnamon and Nemo kept working just fine. I also blocked write access to ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home to prevent gvfsd-metadata from repeatedly writing to it, and everything kept working fine, including MTP (smartphone file browsing through USB) from Nemo.