GNOME Bugzilla – Bug 655811
Search takes too much time and makes system freeze
Last modified: 2011-12-03 15:08:16 UTC
I had mounted a 129GB partition full of documents, pictures, music, and movies. I went to "Activities" and type "em" then try to think of the name of the IM application. Just when I was meditating what the full name of "empathy" is, the disk seemed to be running for things have "em" within names. Everything freezed, and the cursor responded so slowly while others seemed not to respond. I deleted "em" to try to escape from this miserable situation, but that did not help. Finally, I gave up and let the disk running for a few hours. And the problem went out. I doubt that the search used too much resources to let system work as usual.
How big is your ~/.local/share/recently-used.xbel? I have noticed that when this is large search is painfully slow.
I'm on vacation now, and the computer is not around me...Sorry. I will return the size about next Friday. Please wait. :P
It is 99.3 KB, seems not to be big though.
No, mine is 150KB (which corresponds to 225 files listed) and there's no problem. Anyway, even if you have many recent files, you wouldn't experience a complete freeze. You probably suffer from a lack of memory, which can be caused by a leak in the Shell: we don't search for files on the disk, so swapping is the only explanation to disk trashing. Are you able to reproduce the problem? Does it happen in other cases? It would be interesting to get the output of 'top' just before the bug happens (hit '<' three times to sort processes according to their memory usage).
It does not occur again after that freeze. However, it can reproduce after every fresh install. I have reinstalled Fedora 15 because I thought it was a problem with my disk or my installation. But after reinstallation, it happened again, I guess it is a bug of GNOME shell and report the bug. I will do another fresh installation to check 'top' output in these days. I have 4GB of RAM,2.1 GB of swap and using 64-bit Fedora 15.
Wait, the bug only happens when you reinstall the whole system?! Are you keeping your hoe directory, or resetting it to its original state every time? We're not going to be able to debug this correctly if you need to reinstall each time we need an information - better find the real origin of the problem. Something that could explain the freeze would be that thumbnails are generated for all pictures in your recent list the first time you show the overview, if your previous distribution didn't generate them. You can check this by removing ~/.thumbnails and retrying (easier than reinstalling ;-).
Em... removing ~/.thumbnails before a search does not freeze my system. I think I have to test it freshly recently. :P
I have this same bug. I am using x86 Fedora 16. In the "Activities" plane, if it type something, the whole system will hang after the first letter. For example, if i am typing "term", the whole system will hang after i type "t". (It will not show the remaining four characters even though i have typed them in.) Also, i can see constant disk activity during that time. I freshly installed the system anew and there are not much files in my ~. But i have added my Google account, which has nearly 1000 contacts. After the 3-5 seconds freeze, it will show the names of the contacts starting with "T" in my activity plane.
Jith: please open a new report, because your problem is clearly related to having many contacts. The current report is about thumbnails. Cheng-Chia Tseng: did the problem reappear since last time? Or was removing the thumbnails enough?
It does not occur again, fresh F15 and F16 installations both are fine. I don't know what solve the problem, but it just does not happen now.
(In reply to comment #10) > I don't know what solve the problem, but it just does not happen now. Wasn't the removal of ~/.thumbnails the solution? That would mean some kind of broken images can slow down the rendering...
No, I didn't do anything. My GNOME with F15 on PC is fine after that freeze and long waiting. And I don't encounter the same situation with F16 on my laptop.
OK. Let's close it since we have no chance of debugging something that no longer happens. If you're able to reproduce it again, please reopen it, and we'll be glad to continue the investigation. ;-)
Thanks for your kindly help! :)