[CentOS] CentOS6 gvfs disk thrashing

Tue Nov 25 10:23:46 UTC 2014
isdtor <isdtor at gmail.com>

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?