We recently started upgrading users’ workstations to CentOS6. Now we’ve come across an interesting issue:
~user/.local/share/gvfs-metadata is filling up with tons of files. Once there are around 69270 of them, no more are being created, and the NetApp filer the user’s home is on logs:

Directory …./user/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/ reached the maxdirsize limit. Reduce the number of files or use the vol options command to increase this limit..

Nearly all of the files are exactly 32k in size and they are named
.openXXXXXX. All of them are being created within the same range of timestamps, with a time that’s in the past. I.e. even when deleted, they are being recreated with these timestamps.

drwx—— 2 user group 5353472 Nov 15 17:39 ./
drwxr-xr-x 5 user group 4096 Oct 29 11:05 ../
-rw-r–r– 25699 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:11 .open0018OX
-rw-r–r– 42962 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:10 .open0019OX
-rw-r–r– 42962 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:10 .open002EPX
-rw-r–r– 42962 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:10 .open002GPX
-rw-r–r– 25699 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:11 .open002OPX
-rw-r–r– 42962 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:10 .open0037OX
-rw-r–r– 42962 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:10 .open003MPX
-rw-r–r– 42962 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:10 .open004NPX
-rw-r–r– 25699 user group 32768 Nov 11 17:11 .open0067OX

According to lsof, the only processes operating in this directory are a few instances of nautilus and /usr/libexec/gvfsd-metadata. There’s a whole bunch of gvfs* processes running

user 21209 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:00:00 /usr/libexec/gvfsd user 21549 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:03:17
/usr/libexec/gvfsd-trash –spawner :1.2 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/0
user 21788 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:00:06
/usr/libexec/gvfs-gdu-volume-monitor user 21829 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:00:00
/usr/libexec/gvfs-gphoto2-volume-monitor user 21849 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:00:25
/usr/libexec/gvfs-afc-volume-monitor user 22150 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:00:00 /usr/libexec/gvfsd-metadata user 22323 1 0 Nov11 ? 00:00:00
/usr/libexec/gvfsd-burn –spawner :1.2 /org/gtk/gvfs/exec_spaw/1

Does anyone have an idea what’s going on here? And how to stop it?