Certain apps experiencing slowness under latest gnome in Hardy

[Matthew Tighe]

Lastest hardy on Feb 26, 2008. Certain applications have started experiencing slowness on window operations today. For example, Firefox 3 open file dialog takes about 20 seconds to open up. Thunderbird 2.0 does as well. However, swiftweasel shows now such slowness. Gnome appearance applet takes about 20 seconds to launch (shows up in the running program list immediately, but the window takes 20 seconds to pop up).

Nautilus flies open, too.

I ran strace on firefox and thunderbird and the slowness coincides with a futex ETIMEDOUT event. This repeats every few milliseconds until the window opens. The firefox trace is attached to this comment. The same error happend in Thunderbird.

I am running 64-bit with an encrypted file system (128-bit AES). Haven't seen any slowness until today, though.

[Matthew Tighe (tighem)]

This is related to tracker somehow. I noticed every window that was slow was reading files in some manner (appearance window has to read themes, firefox open file reads home directory, etc.). Killed tracker and problem goes away...

[Matthew Tighe (tighem)]

Tracker config file.

[Jamie McCracken (jamiemcc-blueyonder)]

Latest svn has auto pause on mouse moves or key presses to prevent it slowing other apps

Will be in 0.6.5 to be released today

[Frederik Elwert (frederik-elwert)]

I experienced the same bug with tracker 0.6.6, so I guess it isn't fixed yet. Also, I don't think that a freeze of over 20 seconds is related to tracker normally running in the background and can be solved by auto pause.

I suppose this was due to a broken index. "trackerd --reindex" solved the problem for me. I stumbled across many other confirmations of this bug on various forums, and some reported that reinstalling tracker did also help. I guess tracker just doesn't respond due to the broken index and then the calling app pauses for about 25 seconds.

I'm not familiar with the internals of tracker or gnome, but tracker should be more robust in cases of errors like this.

[Michael-Olaf (michael-olaf)]

I have this experience after upgrading to jaunty. Opening gthumb, saving or deleting an image in gthumb is extremely slowly (about 30 sec). After tracker-processes -r speed is fine (less than 1 sec)...

Is this fix already active in jaunty?

[Charles Cazabon (charlesc-web-register-launchpad-net)]

This just started happening to me in Ubuntu jaunty; when bringing up a dialog in various Gnome apps, there is a twenty-five second delay before it appears, during which time the app appears to be frozen. I'm not sure if it affects every application, but I see it in various situations:
  * bringing up the preferences dialog in Transmission
  * bringing up a load or save file dialog in gedit
  * bringing up a file dialog in GIMP
  * bringing up a file dialog in Firefox
  * etc

If I do an strace of the process, the delay appears to be in waiting for a poll() to time out immediately after a write that looks tracker-related. I'll attach a snippet of an strace log of Transmission after I try to open the preferences dialog -- you can clearly see the 25-second delay on lines 40-41.

Is there any additional information I can gather that would help figure out what's causing this?