Uses 20 to 60% of a dual core for what seems like several minutes.
I got tired of this behavior and traced the problem back to samba (of course).
I am not a user of samba, I have other methods so the answer for me was to remove two samba packages.
samba-common
and
samba-common-bin
The gvfs-smb process is no longer loaded, for me, problem solved.
And I should add that I have tried this only once, needs some more verification.
Hi @anon42388993,
could you not just disable Samba?. 
I would think you could, but if you don’t use it, why not just remove it. Are you running 16o4 and not seeing this cpu usage?
Edit
I should add I have removed samba from 3 other installs and problem solved on all.
After todays updates gvfs-smb is back even though samba is still removed. So this was not the answer.
I have located the executable starting the process.
/usr/lib/gvfs/gvfsd-smb-browse