update-notifier stalls/crashes on Xubuntu 8.04

[roots]

Binary package hint: update-notifier

during normal computer use, when update-notifier starts, it will misbehave in the following ways:

-it uses roughly 100% cpu
-no update notification icons whatsoever are shown in panel
-existing symbols in panel are rearranged in irregular way

as for update-notifier itself, this behavior will persist until the process belonging to it is killed. this bug has been reproduced every day from installation up to now; that is, 4 times.

os: Xubuntu 8.04 testing
update-notifier 0.70.7
system: acer travelmate 382tmi

cheers,
.roots

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

Can you please run the command "strace -p process_id" on the process that hangs with 100% cpu?

[roots (roots)]

today i wanted to do the strace thing, but while i searched for the bug report and your reply, the following things happened:

1. after 2..3 minutes the process update-notifier went back to normal cpu usage
2. in the panel, the update-notifier icon appeared but was greyed out, saying that a package manager was running - however - no package manager window appeared on any of the desktops
3. after another 1..2 minutes, the panel icon turned orange and the message "new updates available" appeared

nevertheless, after (1) i did the strace on the process, the output is attached.

i wanted to reproduce the high cpu load, ignored the update-notifier message and restarted the laptop. about a minute after startup, the orange update-notifier icon + message appeared in the panel as it is supposed to happen. i did reproduce this behaviour 4 times. however, in .xsession-errors i found "** (update-notifier:5404): WARNING **: already running?".

although the last times the high cpu usage persisted, i will try to be quicker tomorrow and get the strace during that time.

[roots (roots)]

alright, i finally found the time to collect the strace output. seems to me like something is getting stuck polling for date/time. the strace file includes following:

-begin: just 1..2 seconds after update-notifier started causing high cpu load
-end: update notifier had returned to normal cpu usage, greyed out notify icon appeared but disappeared after some time (~2 min?) without turning orange, without any notification message

in addition, here's another thing i found shortly after the high cpu load started but then disappeared:

icke@lappi:~$ ps aux | grep upda
icke 5320 0.5 3.1 69204 15628 ? R 16:01 0:04 update-notifier --sm-config-prefix /update-notifier-gCMs46/ --sm-client-id 117f000101000120749934300000055090001 --screen 0
root 6414 0.1 0.3 3972 1804 ? SN 16:16 0:00 apt-get -qq update -o APT::Update::Auth-Failure::=cp /usr/share/apt/apt-auth-failure.note /var/lib/update-notifier/user.d/
icke 6444 0.0 0.1 3004 752 pts/0 R+ 16:16 0:00 grep upda
icke@lappi:~$ strace -t -p 5320 &>strace.txt

the following output is attached as strace2.txt

[LauLow (laurenzo-s)]

Hello,
I have just replaced Xubuntu 7.10 by the final release of Xubuntu 8.04, and I do have the same problem, with a similar strace result. I will post it when the bug occurs again. I think it does so when the update notifier is launched for the first time in a session.

[LauLow (laurenzo-s)]

Here is my strace ...

[Florent (florent.x)]

Similar issue here, with Xubuntu 8.04: the cpu is 100% for few minutes after boot up because of update-notifier, while icon is grayed.

[stork (gunnej)]

I can confirm the behaviour. ubuntu 8.04.1 on a 32bit desktop computer.

[Maarten Bezemer (veger)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. We are sorry that we do not always have the capacity to look at all reported bugs in a timely manner. There have been many changes in Ubuntu since that time you reported the bug and your problem may have been fixed with some of the updates. It would help us a lot if you could test it on a currently supported Ubuntu version. When you test it and it is still an issue, kindly upload the updated logs by running apport-collect 214510 and any other logs that are relevant for this particular issue.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for update-notifier (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]