"My system has been running fine for quite some time and then more recently it has become sluggish.. I took a look at the processes running and realized that gvfsd-metadata is hogging 100% cpu cycles and nearly 60% of memory.. It looks like your metadata store is got corrupted, leading to an infinite loop in the code. The fix here is to remove the metadata storage, located in: ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata. I now believe that this could well have come about after the machine completely ran out of disk space one night whilst downloading.. The code to issue the fix is as follows: rm -rf ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata ..Don't forget to check your hard disk space using df -h and free some if necessary.. following your instructions i did: rm -rf ~/.local/share/gvfs-metadata pkill gvfsd-metadata And everything went back to normal.. I was attempting to move about 50,000 text files from an external disk to a folder on the internal disk. When trying to do this... nautilus became sluggish.. Your solution seemed to fix the problem.." :-D hey!