evince mostly un-responsive, without CPU load

[MFeif]

Binary package hint: evince

I'm on Karmic, 64bit, reasonably current dual-core CPU with 4G.

Often when I run evince, sometimes it takes about 30s or more for the UI to show up, and then another long wait before I can even click on anything. All during this time, System-Monitor shows the cpu usage of evince to be 0%. No other tasks are taking more than 1-2% of cpu.

I am running Compiz, so it "dims" unresponsive apps. Evince gets dimmed about every 10 seconds, then comes back to "life" after a few seconds. This process repeats for a while, and then sometimes evince just closes itself with no error message.

Running in terminal displays no error output.

If I try to load a document into it while running it (eg, "evince foo.pdf") the same thing happens; a 10-30s wait with grey-out, followed by an unresponsive (dimming) gui, eventually to be followed by a crash.

[Dennis Sheil (dennis-sheil)]

I was going to say temporarily move your .recently-used.xbel file in case it is trying to reload a broken PDF file, but if this is happening with or without argument, that shouldn't be a problem. The problem you describe only happens to me when it is called without argument and tries to load a broken PDF.

Was it fine with Karmic and then broke, or was it like this from the first time you tried to run it?

One thing that might help diagnose this is to type

"script evince.out"

and then

"strace -tt evince"

Then, if "Force Quit" pops up do that, or go to "File -> Close". Then hit Control-D in the terminal window. Then attach the output here.

For me evince's UI shows up in about a second, on a less powerful machine. With strace running, it takes about five seconds - and that is on the strace delay.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. Please answer these questions:
1. Is this reproducible?
2. If so, what specific steps should we take to recreate this bug? Be as detailed as possible.
This will help us to find and resolve the problem.

[MFeif (matt-feifarek)]

1. Yes it is reproducible, but not 100% of the time. When it happens, it happens over and over, without fail, on any login (I have two that I use). Perhaps it is cleared by rebooting?

When it doesn't happen, it's not reproducible. I can't yet tell what the difference is.

2. If I could have given you perfect steps-to-reproduce, I would have. Without ANY debugging output whatsoever, it's pretty hard to give much else.

Today, so far, it's not happening. When it does again, I will try the strace trick.

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

any news on this?

[David Huggins-Daines (dhuggins)]

I think this may be the same problem as a bug I just reported, but I only have experienced this on Maverick, and it happens all the time for me.

The last things that strace shows before it hangs are:

20:47:55.554915 pipe2([14, 15], O_CLOEXEC) = 0
20:47:55.555104 write(9, "A", 1) = 1
20:47:55.555154 futex(0x7f393fff3788, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 1
20:47:55.555191 futex(0x7f393ffccc40, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1) = 1
20:47:55.555232 futex(0x7f393ffe9720, FUTEX_WAKE_PRIVATE, 1
20:47:55.555303 poll([{fd=14, events=POLLIN}], 1, 25000^C <unfinished ...>

[David Huggins-Daines (dhuggins)]

This bug is fixed for me in Evince 2.32.0

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

thanks, closing the bug.