Gnome contacts hangs with 100% CPU and growing memory.

[Andrew Myers]

What I expected:
That gnome-contacts would open and allow me to edit my contacts.

What actually happened:
The WM window decoration appeared but no application was drawn inside the window. The gnome-contacts process run with 100% cpu usage and continuously growing memory usage until I kill it.

This appears to be the same behavior as bug #1070315 that I filed against empathy so it's probably a common library.
I've attached three backtraces which I collected by attaching to the gnome-contacts process and running the following commands:

thread apply all bt
cont
wait ~ 10 seconds
thread apply all bt
cont
wait ~10 seconds
thread apply all bt

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: gnome-contacts 3.6.0-0ubuntu2
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-18.29-generic 3.5.7
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-18-generic x86_64
NonfreeKernelModules: nvidia
ApportVersion: 2.6.1-0ubuntu6
Architecture: amd64
Date: Thu Nov 15 12:58:36 2012
InstallationDate: Installed on 2012-05-25 (173 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.04 LTS "Precise Pangolin" - Release amd64 (20120425)
MarkForUpload: True
ProcEnviron:
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 XDG_RUNTIME_DIR=<set>
 LANG=en_US.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/zsh
SourcePackage: gnome-contacts
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to quantal on 2012-10-22 (23 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Julien Olivier (julo)]

I confirm this bug in Trusty.

[Julien Olivier (julo)]

OK, I found the culprit (for me, at least): I had thousands of bogus gmail contacts (created by a bug in thunderbird's google contacts addon). I deleted them and now everything is fine. Sorry!

[Jean-Pierre van Riel (jpvr)]

Still a bug because same thing happens with the evolution-ews plugin for outlook corporate GALs (global address lists) being quite large, e.g. 65K contacts, whereby a single thread can use over 3GB RAM in gnome-contacts! Clearly it doesn't efficiently iterate through the contact list if it's bulk loading everything into RAM each time the GAL update is done...