Evolution slows down and nearly freezes when bringing up a new compose window

[Dan Lenski]

Binary package hint: evolution

This bug has just appeared for me with the upgrade to Jaunty 9.04. When clicking on the button to compose a new message, Evolution become totally unresponsive for 60-100 seconds before it brings up the window. (Applies equally when replying to a message, or forwarding, or any other action that would bring up a new Compose window.)

There is a brief (1-2 second) spike in CPU usage by Evolution right after I click the New Message button, then its CPU usage falls to zero until it suddenly pops up the window a minute or two later. This is on an Athlon 64 X2 with 4gb of RAM, running the amd64 version of Jaunty.

This appears to be similar, but even worse, than this old unresolved bug reported here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/159153 As you can imagine, waiting 1-2 minutes to compose a new message makes the program darn near unusable.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please try to obtain a backtrace following the instructions at http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and upload the backtrace (as an attachment) to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[Dan Lenski (lenski)]

Hi Sebastien, there is no backtrace! Evolution doesn't actually crash... just hangs for 60-100 seconds and then resumes working. Running "evolution --debug" unfortunately provides absolutely no useful information. Any other suggestions for data gathering?

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

run evolution under gdb, do ctrl-C when it's hanging and get a stacktrace it will indicate where it hangs

[Dan Lenski (lenski)]

It's pretty hard to follow since it launches a large number of new threads during this apparent hang.

However, it's also kernel-dependent: booting with the Intrepid kernel (2.6.27-14) fixes the problem.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

reassigning to linux if the intrepid linux version makes it work correctly

[Mattia Rossi (mattia-rossi)]

Don't know if it can be filed under the same bug, but I have the same behaviour (60 to 100 seconds wait when clicking on New Mail).

Ubuntu 9.04, evolution 2.26.1

It only happens with one user (i.e. if when I am having this problem I switch to a different user I don't have the delay).
A reboot 'fixes' the problem for a while, then it pops up again.
Attached is a stack trace of a run from gdb.
I hit the New Message button, waited for 5-10 secs, the hit ctrl-c in gdb
Looks like evolution gets stuck waiting for tracker/dbus to do something ....

A evolution --force-shutdown doesn't resolve the issue, nor a logout of the user having the issue.
What I can try next time it happens:
restart dbus/trackerd
disable email indexing in tracker search preferences

Don't know when it will happen again though

[Craig Ringer (ringerc)]

Looks like a tracker issue. Ick. Bugs of interest:

  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/tracker/+bug/190918
  https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/218230

[kernel-janitor (kernel-janitor)]

Hi lenski,

Please be sure to confirm this issue exists with the latest development release of Ubuntu. ISO CD images are available from http://cdimage.ubuntu.com/releases/ . Please then run following command from a Terminal (Applications->Accessories->Terminal). It will automatically gather and attach updated debug information to this report.

apport-collect -p linux-image-`uname -r` 366101

Also, if you could test the latest upstream kernel available that would be great. It will allow additional upstream developers to examine the issue. Refer to https://wiki.ubuntu.com/KernelMainlineBuilds . Once you've tested the upstream kernel, please remove the 'needs-upstream-testing' tag. This can be done by clicking on the yellow pencil icon next to the tag located at the bottom of the bug description and deleting the 'needs-upstream-testing' text. Please let us know your results.

Thanks in advance.

[This is an automated message. Apologies if it has reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Craig Ringer (ringerc)]

A patch to gtk to address this issue was merged upstream quite some time ago, so it should be resolved by now.