I upgraded to 1.12.3-4 on the 6th of February, but didn't restart the computer until yesterday. After restarting, I experienced a desktop freeze, so I restarted and checked the logs but there was nothing relevant there. The freeze happened again, and by the time I switched to another tty and fired up htop, the gvfs-metadata service was using 80% RAM plus 100% CPU (with over 1 GiB already swapped).
There is no remote filesystem involved, and the behavior is similar to the one described in bug #695306, but with the newer version. By downgrading to 1.12.3-3, gvfs-metadata stopped misbehaving. - System Information: Debian Release: 7.0 APT prefers testing-updates APT policy: (500, 'testing-updates'), (500, 'testing-proposed-updates'), (500, 'testing'), (200, 'unstable'), (101, 'experimental') Architecture: amd64 (x86_64) Foreign Architectures: i386 Kernel: Linux 3.2.0-4-amd64 (SMP w/2 CPU cores) Locale: LANG=en_US.UTF-8, LC_CTYPE=en_US.UTF-8 (charmap=UTF-8) Shell: /bin/sh linked to /bin/dash Versions of packages gvfs depends on: ii gvfs-common 1.12.3-3 ii gvfs-daemons 1.12.3-3 ii gvfs-libs 1.12.3-3 ii libc6 2.13-38 ii libdbus-1-3 1.6.8-1 ii libglib2.0-0 2.33.12+really2.32.4-5 ii libudev0 175-7.1 gvfs recommends no packages. Versions of packages gvfs suggests: ii gvfs-backends 1.12.3-3 -- no debconf information -- John.