Comment 5 for bug 293535

I can confirm this one. I upgraded from Ubuntu 8.04 to 8.10, and since the upgrade gconf2 is eating CPU. After installing glib debug symbols, I got this stack trace for the rampant process:

(gdb) bt full
#0 0x00007f7c59cb41cf in poll () from /lib/libc.so.6
No symbol table info available.
#1 0x00007f7c5a1a23a8 in g_main_context_iterate (context=0x9c36d0, block=1, dispatch=1, self=<value optimized out>)
    at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.18.2/glib/gmain.c:3091
 max_priority = 2147483647
 timeout = 22440
 some_ready = <value optimized out>
 nfds = 51
 allocated_nfds = <value optimized out>
 fds = (GPollFD *) 0xcee440
 __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ = "g_main_context_iterate"
#2 0x00007f7c5a1a2a3d in IA__g_main_loop_run (loop=0x9ccfd0) at /build/buildd/glib2.0-2.18.2/glib/gmain.c:2986
 self = (GThread *) 0x9bad90
 __PRETTY_FUNCTION__ = "IA__g_main_loop_run"
#3 0x000000000040b059 in main ()
No symbol table info available.

This seems to be a part of the normal glib main loop. From an strace, it seems that there's a lot of CORBA communication going on (lots of stuff starting with GIOP being written to sockets), but I'm unsure with what.

I've tried disabling desktop effects, but the problem is there with metacity as well as with compiz (which is otherwise working fine).

I also tried to disable more and more of my desktop by killing processes, on the theory that the problem is with some other application keeping gconfd busy all the time, but that didn't help any either.

Looks like I'll be limping along on one core for a while. If there's anything I can do to help debug please let me know.