to bloat or not to bloat, debate gvfs-metadata.service

[solarbear]

anybody ever notice what an increase in performance caja gets when getting this POS out of the processes? I noticed also that outbound packets were reduced also. Is it ok to just leave it masked? Everything appears to be running ok without it.

here is how i suspended it:

systemctl --user mask gvfs-metadata.service

reboot.

then to unmask:

systemctl --user unmask gvfs-metadata.service

reboot

all i could get out of briefly reading up on it is that it is a service that automounts usb sticks.

[vanadium]

gvfs-metadata actually maintains metadata about your files. Metadata is used by (primarily GTK) applications for various purposes, such as storing icon positions, last-played locations, document positions, … They are written in a separate location, so indeed constitute a parallel housekeeping over that of the file system. It is therefore well possible that file operations may sometimes appear slightly snappier if gvfs-metadata.service is not running.

[Hoser Rob]

It's not always easy to say whether something like this is an improvement or not. Services like this often speed the user up more than they slow the system down. I'd be inclined to let it run.

[solarbear]

After a couple weeks of usage with this service stopped, all worked ok without it. The only notable deviation was the desktop icons not quite arranging the way they used to. Disabling this service is maybe good thing for those users limited to 4gb ram or less and users suffering from poor file operation performance with their file managers.