Liferea tries to kill my hard drive with constant seeking after long idle periods / screen saver use

[Aaron Plattner]

Binary package hint: liferea

On a number of different occasions, I've woken up or arrived home to find my hard drive clicking very rapidly. Moving the mouse to deactivate the screensaver makes it stop. Today, I logged in remotely and iotop revealed the culprit to be liferea-bin:

Total DISK READ: 0 B/s | Total DISK WRITE: 64.39 K/s
  PID USER DISK READ DISK WRITE SWAPIN IO> COMMAND
27855 aaron 0 B/s 64.39 K/s 0.00 % 0.00 % liferea-bin

Unfortunately, I accidentally bumped the mouse before I could attach to it with strace. I've been leaving Liferea running with the feed window open. No other processes were causing disk I/O according to iotop.

I'm using liferea 1.4.18-0ubuntu2 in Ubuntu 8.10 running Gnome.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

This happened again, so I managed to grab a backtrace and strace. The strace, including all 23 of those fdatasync calls, only spans a couple of seconds.

[Cyril Jaquier (cyril-jaquier)]

Since I upgraded to Jaunty, liferea generates a lots of IO when refreshing the feeds. I tried with liferea 1.5.8 but the result is the same. I'm almost sure that with Intrepid liferea didn't add such bad performance.

This is maybe related to sqlite.

ii liferea 1.4.23-0ubuntu2 feed aggregator for GNOME
ii libsqlite3-0 3.6.10-1 SQLite 3 shared library

[akudewan (akudewan)]

I have the same issue as @Aaron Plattner. Using liferea 1.4.18-0ubuntu2 in Ubuntu 8.10. Running Gnome.

[CyaniCs (cyanics)]

Confirmed on Jaunty 9.04 with liferea 1.4.26.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

Emilio, what is your rationale for marking this bug a duplicate of bug 290666? In that bug, liferea is slow to start due to an excessive number of fsyncs. In this bug, the system is completely idle and liferea goes nuts with fdatasync calls that stop when I move the mouse to kill the screensaver.

[Emilio Pozuelo Monfort (pochu)]

My bad Aaron, this is indeed not a duplicate.

[bojo42 (bojo42)]

Could you please verify if that issue is still present with the current package in precise and reopen if so. Thanks.

[Aaron Plattner (aplattner)]

I stopped using Liferea ages ago. Closing as Invalid - Don't Care.