Too many crash files make the device utterly slow or unresponsive

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement]

Tested on krillin rc-proposed/118.

This is a follow up from bug 1473562.

When there are too many crash files, that the size of the crash files is large, and the device becomes utterly slow or unresponsive while the files are uploaded. It the same scenario than the bug in reference fixed in previous OTA but with different symptoms.

Workaround:
1. Disable wifi
2. Enable developer mode
3. Connect to the device with adb
4. Clean up the crash directory
$ sudo rm /var/crash/_*

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Steve Langasek (vorlon)]

The changes for bug #1473562 were intended to ensure that only one instance of whoopsie-upload-all is running at a time, which should have significantly improved the memory pressure caused by large numbers of crash files. Uploading the files is by itself not expected to cause performance issues for the device. Can someone who's seeing this issue please provide:

 - full output of 'ps auxwf' on an affected system
 - output of 'cat /proc/loadavg'
 - output of 'free'

[Jean-Baptiste Lallement (jibel)]

I lokked a bit more into the behaviour of the device when there are lot of crash files and the slowness is very likely due to IO bottleneck. Not much apport can do.