Comment 116 for bug 1532226

Hi everybady,

I have made an interesting discovery.

I would voluntarily merge bugs #1532226 and #1532318 and will consequently consider both the menus malfunction and the open apps tracking malfunction collectively as THE BUG in the rest of this message.

Like others, I witness THE BUG the first time I login on fresh boot.

Once my session fully loaded but broken, I logout. Then I login again and I have a perfectly functional session without suffering from THE BUG.

I first tried to look at /tmp directory contents variations from session to session but found nothing.

But I noticed that failing sessions took a huge time to load while functional sessions only took a few seconds. My understanding was then that there must be a race in initialisation of the different components involved (Unity, Bamf, Wnck, DBus, whatever ...), and I suspect one of them may well bailout if some other componant doen't respond within an arbitry fixed delay (which is rather bad desing).

Now, consider my last functional session already open, I will do the following steps in order :

  - 1) Close this session (logout).

  - 2) Drop the caches to simulate a fresh boot using bash as root :
         root@maison:~# sync ; echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches
         root@maison:~#

  - 3) Login again.

  - 4) Test the newly open session (menus, open apps tracking).

I can clearly see at step #4 that THE BUG reappeared.

Then I logout and login again and, guess what ? THE BUG disappeared !

That's why I think this is races which cause THE BUG.

In hope this helps.

Sincerely,
Valentin