gtkiconview issue, evolution chokes when attaching files sometimes

[Vincenzo Ciancia]

This is a new bug in karmic, not present in jaunty.

I have a 6mb pdf file which consists of scanned pages. I try to attach it to an e-mail in evolution but it becomes unresponsive and top shows it's taking up to 600mb and growing. The same does not happen with 6mb of random data (courtesy of /dev/urandom). I am not going to attach the file here since it is copyrighted material, but I can surely provide the file privately to whoever needs it for debugging purposes.

Update: the same happens with a 900k zip file, again I can't post it here but can send it privately. This time there are no huge scanned pdfs involved but there still are pdfs in the zip file.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, what ubuntu version do you use?

[Vincenzo Ciancia (vincenzo-ml)]

As in subject :) I am using karmic. I don't know if the bug is also in jaunty too.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

The bug should be sent to the software writes on http://bugzilla.gnome.org by somebody having the issue

[Vincenzo Ciancia (vincenzo-ml)]

Done. We can't know the impact of this bug because it's not normal to send large pdf attachments. So I encourage anyone reading here, having scanned pdfs of more than 2mb, to do a test with evolution. It may be a memory leak that stayed there for months or years.

[Steven Farmer (stevenleefarmer)]

Attaching a 1.2 megabyte jpeg to an email results in the same behaviour.
Running karmic beta with updates, evolution 2.28.0-0ubuntu4,
kernel 2.6.31-12-generic. In my case I have to hit the power button to
regain control. Definitely a showstopper for me.

[Steven Farmer (stevenleefarmer)]

I used tcsh's limit command to limit memoryuse to 128M and vmemoryuse to 256M, started evolution, composed an email and attached the jpeg. Cpu usage immediately went to 99.9%, but I was able to do a 'kill -ABRT' and get a core dump. The process was in /usr/lib/libcairo.so.2 when it died. On a hunch, I used 'System->Preferences->Appearance' to change the theme from 'LegacyHuman' to 'Human' and tried again. This time evolution behaves itself, although the progress bar animation that appears as the attachment is read is awfully jerky (but I can live with that). Could this be a gtk bug? The core file is 181 megabytes, so I'm just attaching a typesrcipt file showing the gdb which command.

[323232 (323232)]

Confirmed: attaching normal jpg fotographs (testen with app 600K an 6 mb) freezes the whole system.
Using evo 2..28.0.Oubuntu4 in Karmic.
see also Bug #443028 reported by jatin sachdeva on 2009-10-05

Open Evolution
Compose message
Add attachment (.jpg app. 5mb)
Under attachment bar mini picture and progressbar flickkering
Most of the times Compleet freeze: Have to push power off for a hard stop...
Sometimes very very very slow with high disactivity (bear freeze?) , with a lot of luck logout: 2 messeages that evolution is still running, logingout anyway, login in - system monitor- evolution and evolution data server still running
In other words: Impossible to add an attachment in evolution......

Follwing meesages in xsession-errors.old (due restart)
** (evolution:1884): DEBUG: mailto URL command: evolution %s
** (evolution:1884): DEBUG: mailto URL program: evolution

(nautilus:1969): Eel-CRITICAL **: eel_preferences_get_boolean: assertion `preferences_is_initialized ()' failed

** (evolution:1884): CRITICAL **: murrine_style_draw_box: assertion `width >= -1' failed

[323232 (323232)]

Got the hint in Bug #443028 to use the list view for attachments instead of the iconview.
Works perfect as a workaround!

[christopher pijarski (kpijarski)]

I do experience the same problem, from time to time to time dragging an attachment from nautlus will produce the described symptoms. IMO this doesn't have anything to do with the size of the file, though - try using the "send to" dialog in nautilus - this way evolutions ends up eating all the resources in 100% of cases, even with files (odt) as small as 33 Kb, at least this is how it look on my machine (macbook pro 5,5, Karmic Beta).

[Jeff Fortin Tam (kiddo)]

The bug that is causing this is a GTK bug. In https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=597974

It was revealed that https://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=581150 was the cause. Please backport the fix from GTK!

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

Accepted into karmic-proposed, the package will build now and be available in a few hours. Please test and give feedback here. See https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Testing/EnableProposed for documentation how to enable and use -proposed. Thank you in advance!

[iMac (imac-netstatz)]

Using us.archive, I pulled down the new packages,

moose@repo:~/Desktop$ dpkg -l | grep 2.18.3
ii gtk2-engines-pixbuf 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
ii libgail-common 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
ii libgail18 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
ii libgtk2.0-0 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
ii libgtk2.0-bin 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
ii libgtk2.0-common 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
ii libgtk2.0-dev 2.18.3-1ubuntu1
moose@repo:~/Desktop$

gtk+2.0 (2.18.3-1ubuntu1) karmic-proposed; urgency=low

  * debian/patches/093_git_change_fix_gtkiconview_rendering_issue.patch:
    - git change fixing a gtkiconview layout issue leading to evolution
hangs
      (lp: #393534)

-- Sebastien Bacher <email address hidden> Mon, 02 Nov 2009 15:09:34 +0100

Performed a quick before and after test. Unfortunately even after reboot
I am still experiencing this hang.

Attached is my evo strace if that helps.

On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 14:33 +0000, Martin Pitt wrote:
> Please test and give feedback here.

[iMac (imac-netstatz)]

My testing with the new packages was unsuccessful; Additional version details are in my email comments which should appear here shortly.

A note for testers, this is easily reproducible by attaching a small tif file (http://launchpadlibrarian.net/33234697/test.tif) to an email composed in Thunderbird and trying to open it in Evolution. Per #445435 using gmail web client, or evolution itself to send the attachment does not generate the required conditions to hit this bug.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

the issue some users are having could be bug #460710 too

[iMac (imac-netstatz)]

True, but the issue duplicated from 445435, and easily reproducible is
the now linked gtk bug. I our case there is no memory or CPU spin like
460710.

I am interested to know if there is insight as to why the patch was not
effective given the upstream resolution.

For now, we are sticking to Crux :) _ it reminds me of a purple Woody.

On Mon, 2009-11-02 at 21:31 +0000, Sebastien Bacher wrote:
> the issue some users are having could be bug #460710 too
>

[iMac (imac-netstatz)]

my issue where some emails with attachments hang evolution ($445435) when using non-Crux themes is linked to https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/evolution/+bug/460710

[Jaap Woldringh (jjh-woldringh)]

I have this problem too, attaching a 600 KB file, using the ***attachment button*** at the bottom.
The interface of Evolution gets gray, and the computer unresponsive.
Leaving the computer alone for some time restores the responsiveness (only tried this once).

===> Using the menu this problem does not occur.

I am using a fully updated (November 6, 2009) Karmic, with the standard theme.

Jaap Woldringh

[Martin Pitt (pitti)]

The proposed update was not verified to work, and now got shadowed by the SRU in bug 401823, so this needs to be fixed and reuploaded.

[Martin Mai (mrkanister-deactivatedaccount-deactivatedaccount)]

The gtk issue should be fixed in Ubuntu 10.04.

[Rolf Leggewie (r0lf)]

karmic has seen the end of its life and is no longer receiving any updates. Marking the karmic task for this ticket as "Won't Fix".