I’ve been trying to find reasons as to why it is eating so much ram, it sometimes happens at random or when i check my videos folder, i do not have a network drive, i do not have large ammounts of videos that need thumbanils to generate for, i even disabled the thumbnail generation
That’s the thumbnail generation that make this kio/thumbnail.so.
What is the kind of network mount ? using smb:// or nfs:// urls or fstab/udisks mount ?
If you use mount please detail the mountpoints.
That’s half expected if you use thumbnails for remote files, the files need to be copied unless you have kio-fuse installed in the case of smb:// or nfs:// or read completely over the network in the nfs/smb mount cases.
But once the videos are copied and thumbnails are generated this shouldn’t stay in memory, they should be cached on disk only.
There is probably a bug afoot, a mem-leak or a non-release of memory.
The versions that matter here are KDE Gears (kio-extras) and KDE Frameworks (kio).
We’d need precise reproducible steps to investigation.
i even disabled the thumbnail generation
Where ? In the preview settings for remote files, or for the directory ?
I might have some information to report regarding this bug or at least a similar one, which consistently crashes my computer as soon as I open one specific folder with previews enabled on Dolphin (‘show Preview’ check box on the main menu).
I generated some data plot using python for some physics project, which are stored as png files with dimensions 25 600 x 19 200 and a size of ~2Mb on disk. This choice of resolution is obviously a hurdle for Dolphin’s preview system, but is most certainly not supposed to crash the computer.
Nonetheless, entering in a directory in which there is a single one of these file quickly raise memory usage by a few gigabytes before returning to normal, which seems to be intended, but the folder with 4 of them provokes a freeze (4Gb to 16Gb RAM usage in ~5 seconds), which the system sometimes recovers from by killing kioworker (and Spotify at times), sometimes not. Simply opening the folder, or hovering a file in case the system recovered at first, is enough to trigger the memory rise.
This is not so much of an issue to me, but I leave the details here if a developer deems it worth investigating.
kio-extras 26.04.0-1
kio 6.25.0-1
Dolphin 26.04.0
htop screenshot seconds before a crash occurred attached
dmesg crash log from a recovered memory overflow : pastebin com mxyJU1nC
uname -a : Linux gvanleene-hplaptop14em0xxx 6.18.26-1-MANJARO #1 SMP PREEMPT_DYNAMIC Thu, 30 Apr 2026 17:30:39 +0000 x86_64 GNU/Linux
That’s really a different case as the initial thread.
That could cause some hurdle 2MB on disk maybe but that’s a lot more once in memory and 491520000 pixels to reduce to a a thumbnail is very memory and cpu intensive…
You can set a max size for image file to make preview to 1.8MB to avoid the issue in the settings.
Or disable the previews for the folders.
This might trigger some issues, but it should generate previews only once per-file per dimension.
You can test with a folder with only one of those files, to see how long this takes for a file, and whether the thumbnail works as expected, i.e the next time you go to the folder there is no thumbnail generation.
We want to stop the thumbnail process once the folder is not in view anymore which Dolphin might not do at the moment.
