Comment 10 for bug 1248106

'Privilege' in the sense of 'Python programming competence' (totally new to it) or 'System privileges' (aka 'root')?
Later: Yes. I assumed that became implicitly clear after modifying the installed Polly source to achieve the stack monitoring.

The root cause clearly seems to be the SOCKS connection, therefore I kept that part in the title ;-).
I didn't want to be inpolite. It's only that in n my view a process intermittently starting to constantly eat CPU, blocking the whole application (no feed updates, no application exit possible, aka softlock) is an important information for triaging a bugs severity and content. But sure - matter of personal taste. Please change whatever you like. Sorry for that.

So - any hints what to do?

My rough guess would be:
a) SOCKS connection attempts time out to fast & don't retry. -> Empty "Avatars"
b) Established SOCKS connection don't time out at all even if stalled/broken -> CPU load due to busy waiting.
c) Blocked application state due to threads blocking/waiting for each other -> Softlock