gnome-system-log hangs then crashes with large messages file

[Rocko]

Binary package hint: gnome-system-tools

My messages file grew to 940MB or so due to a wireless LAN module bug that was causing continuous kernel panics and the messages.0 file was 2 GB.

Then whenever I ran gnome-system-log, it then no longer worked: instead, it unexpectedly hung on startup, turned grey, and eventually died (this even after a fresh reboot).

I eventually stopped it from crashing by moving all the messages* files into another folder - but after I moved them back into /var/log, gnome-system-log no longer hangs or crashes when I run, so I can't reproduce the problem now. I did delete some other large files such as kern.log and syslog, so maybe these files were also relevant to the crash.

I have seen gnome-system-log hang several times like this over the last few weeks: previously it seemed to sort itself out (eventually).

I've attached an strace of gnome-system-log from when it hung (I force-closed it in this case rather than waiting until it crashed).

Version info:

Ubuntu 8.10, kernel 2.6.27-7-generic i386
gnome-system-tools 2.22.1-0ubuntu1

[Pedro Villavicencio (pedro)]

Thanks for your bug report. Please try to obtain a backtrace of the hang http://wiki.ubuntu.com/DebuggingProgramCrash and attach the file to the bug report. This will greatly help us in tracking down your problem.

[Rocko (rockorequin)]

I was about to when I accidentally fixed the problem. I'll do one if I can reproduce it again.

I was hoping the strace might help in seeing what was causing the temporary freeze - normally gnome-system-log starts up and fills its text windows pretty fast, and the strace I got from the hang looked quite different from a normal one.

[PessimistByNature (pessimistbynature)]

I seem to have run into the same error, so I did my best at running a backtrace, which is attached. It is, however, my first time trying, so if there is something I did wrong or any other information that might help, please let me know.