Lately my Ubuntu 14.04 computer has been quite noisy. It's the CPU heat sink that's unusually active. If I run top, I see that hud-service is taking up ever more memory (59% of 8GB at this moment), with 101% of CPU being used by it. I killed this process, and the heat-sink fan is less constant, but still going more often than it should. Looking at top now, I see that Nautilus is taking about 38% of the CPU up. It has been doing this for days now.
Why!? What could Nautilus possibly be doing?
51 Answer
It appears to have been related to a very very large image file I had on my desktop. My guess is that nautilus was trying to create a thumbnail and never managed for reasons relating to its size. Anyway, I deleted it, and the cpu-fan quietened down.
