constant data upload while running

[Gary Houston]

For serveral hours, whoopsie has been uploading data on my system. I only noticed it because I have a slow ADSL connection and it's eating into my bandwidth. After some research I discovered that the uploads could be stopped by uninstalling whoopsie, and later by editing /etc/default/whoopsie to report_crashes=no.

However I still don't have a clue what is causing the underlying problem. Perhaps I should build it and run it in a debugger? Is there any other way to see what it's doing? Are there any instructions on how to build it (there's no README in the sources and I'm missing some dev libraries apparently.)

[Gary Houston (ghouston)]

aha, running as:

sudo CRASH_DB_URL=https://daisy.ubuntu.com whoopsie -f

Using lock path: /var/lock/whoopsie/lock
Could not get the Network Manager state: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBus.Error.ServiceUnknown: The name org.freedesktop.NetworkManager was not provided by any .service files
Parsing /var/crash/_usr_bin_rawtherapee.1000.crash.
Uploading /var/crash/_usr_bin_rawtherapee.1000.crash.

Which is a 434372513 byte file. Which will take forever to upload with my connection.

I think I'll leave report_crashes=no in future.

And is this a bug, that a background process can steal massive amounts of bandwidth without ever asking the user?

[Mike Doherty (doherty)]

I've seen this chronically as well.

Whoopsie should probably do something different when crash files are huge, such as (in decreasing order of preference) not upload the file, prompt for permission to upload the file, or throttle the upload.

[Mike Doherty (doherty)]

Happened again today. Uploading a 44M crash dump as fast as you can is not going to work as well as whoopsie imagines it might.

[Gary Houston (ghouston)]

See also https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/whoopsie/+bug/1255165

I wonder if anybody is even maintaining this package, given the lack of response after a year. Setting report_crashes=no in /etc/default/whoopsie for every new installation is the best policy in the meantime.