Gnome-panel eats about 80 percent cpu

[klippm]

Binary package hint: gnome-panel

After fresh install of ubuntu 7.10 on my laptop I experience after a few minutes of working that the gnome-panel eats the power of one of my Core2Duo.
The panel is not accessible any more.
I have to switch to the console via ALT+F1 and when opening a top, gnome-panel runs with about 90% Cpucycles.
When killing the process I can switch back to the GUI and all works fine for a few minutes.

I experienced this problem during my first test's with gutsy before several month's, but switched back to feisty (thanks god for partimage).
Now I would give gutsy a new chance, nothing changed. I hope I shouldn't need my backup this time.

I hope you guys can help.

[Nicolas DERIVE (kalon33)]

I've the same problem with my account on Hardy (updated from Gutsy which were upgraded from Feisty and Dapper during their development cycles) for a few weeks. But another account (created on gutsy before upgrading to Hardy devel) which is rarely used gives me a "normal" panel, which not uses a lot of cpu. The panel which eats a lot of cpu is not killed on kill X (ctrl+alt+backspace) though. I had to kill it manually in a terminal.

[klippm (klipp-m)]

My installation is also a upgrade from Dapper to Feisty.
I noticed that there are some other threads with this behavior.
I checked my profile and found in ~/.config/menus/ two entries.
I moved the menus folder to _menus and this fixed the problem.
I'll have to check this in deep the next days.

Nicolas could you please check this also?

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. The issue that you reported is one that should be reproducible with the live environment of the Desktop CD of the development release - Hardy Heron. It would help us greatly if you could test with it so we can work on getting it fixed in the next release of Ubuntu. You can find out more about the development release at http://www.ubuntu.com/testing/ . Thanks again and we appreciate your help.

[klippm (klipp-m)]

I figured out what's going wrong.
I found some other bug reports which addresses the same issue.
The problem starts when you create a panel on the left side.
Per default the panel is only 23 dots (pixel), but you can't see the Images.
In this case all is OK.
But you want to see the Images, to know which apps are open.
So you change the properties to minimum 30 pixel, you can see all apps are opend with a fancy icon in th panel.
When you open more than 7 applications the gnome-panel freezes.
Killing the task didn't help until you reduce the count of apps to max = 7.

Btw, : how can I install the sources to fix this problem directly, When enabling the sources check box in synaptic I can only install the gnome-panel-dbg but no source code.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thanks for the bug report. This particular bug has already been reported, but feel free to report any other bugs you find.

[benab (benbeyeler)]

klippm,
Your description regarding the panel on the left side, with more than 7 apps and more than 23 pixels is exactly the problem that I am having also. I am glad you were able pinpoint it! I also have Gutsy.
I put the panel on the left because my laptop has a wide screen.

Thanks for nailing down the variables that cause this bug to happen!

-Ben

[pichulines (pichulines)]

Hi, the same happens to me.

I have one panel on the left side showing up to 32pixels. When I open more than 7 apps the gnome-panel eats almost 80% of cpu. I have tested it in my laptop (ubuntu 8.04 64bits) and desktop computer (ubuntu 8.04 32bits). I can also confirm it in ubuntu 7.10 64bits, last release I had in my laptop.

Thanks to klippm for clearing this rare bug.