After an evaluation, GNOME has moved from Bugzilla to GitLab. Learn more about GitLab.
No new issues can be reported in GNOME Bugzilla anymore.
To report an issue in a GNOME project, go to GNOME GitLab.
Do not go to GNOME Gitlab for: Bluefish, Doxygen, GnuCash, GStreamer, java-gnome, LDTP, NetworkManager, Tomboy.
Bug 523252 - recently used should stop eating my desktop performance
recently used should stop eating my desktop performance
Status: RESOLVED DUPLICATE of bug 488507
Product: gtk+
Classification: Platform
Component: Class: GtkRecent
2.13.x
Other All
: Normal critical
: ---
Assigned To: gtk-bugs
Emmanuele Bassi (:ebassi)
Depends on:
Blocks:
 
 
Reported: 2008-03-18 21:50 UTC by Jean-François Fortin Tam
Modified: 2008-03-18 22:36 UTC
See Also:
GNOME target: ---
GNOME version: 2.21/2.22


Description Jean-François Fortin Tam 2008-03-18 21:50:34 UTC 
Please describe the problem:
~/.recently-used.xbel grows without limitations. As I was wondering what was going on with gedit hogging the CPU for 5 seconds when saving anything, or EOG taking 15 seconds to load a jpeg that loaded in 1.3 seconds in gliv or kview, and after investigation in #gedit, it was revealed that ~/.recently-used.xbel was obese.

This file is 2.9 MiB on my desktop computer, totalling about 60 000 lines of XML. On my laptop, it weights 4.8 MiB, and it is totalling 99 928 lines! In this file, I have entries dating back too 2007-04-03; that's just about one year of useless history!

I am very shocked, here's why:
- I have never used the "recent documents" feature of my entire geek life
- I thought I was free from the "computer slows down with time" syndrome
- It affects (all?) the applications that use gtkRecent, and that's quite a lot.
- It makes GNOME look bad

Steps to reproduce:
1. use the GNOME desktop for a few months

Actual results:
Suffer, as the entire gnome ecosystem crawls on your computer for no obvious reason (I noticed this in gedit in bug #512108, eog in bug #500772, and have not yet tested other applications and login time impact; I assume it must be quite significant). I wondered why I could not experience all the great performance improvements that had been announced in the last few gnome releases.

Expected results:
Do not act like Windows.

Does this happen every time?
Yes.

Other information:
Comment 1 Emmanuele Bassi (:ebassi) 2008-03-18 21:59:34 UTC 
I'm actually very shocked you never bothered looking in bugzilla for a similar bug and just Cc-ing yourself in.

please, read 488507 for the context.

*** This bug has been marked as a duplicate of 488507 ***
Comment 2 Jean-François Fortin Tam 2008-03-18 22:36:05 UTC 
well, the comment "thanks, fixed in trunk and in the gtk-2-12 stable branch" in the other bug (I am running gnome 2.22 with gtk 2.12.9) made me think that this was a different issue, so sorry for the duplicate.