tracker-extract causing dbus denial-of-service

[Michael Gratton]

After log in, tracker-extract is causing a denial-of-service against the session dbus daemon by keeping many (1000+) open connections to it. The large number of connections causes the session daemon to run out of file descriptors, and hence unable to accept any new connections. This leads to the desktop becoming unresponsive and non-functional, since nearly everything uses dbus these days.

A typical symptom of the problem looks like this:

> mjg@montbard:~ $ emacs
> (emacs:21035): GConf-WARNING **: Client failed to connect to the D-BUS daemon:
> Failed to determine seats of user "1000": Too many open files

When this is occurring, lsof reports the session dbus-daemon instance has 1024 FD's open - most of them being pipes, and tracker-extract in a similar situation. On killing tracker-extract, the number of dbus-daemon FDs open returns to some small sane number, and it returns to being able to accept connections again.

This mainly seems to happen some time not long after log-in, so presumably tracker-extract has a dbus connection leak and tracker's initial scan-on-start is causing it to become pathological.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 13.10
Package: tracker-extract 0.16.2-1ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.11.0-12.19-generic 3.11.3
Uname: Linux 3.11.0-12-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.12.5-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
Date: Sun Oct 13 11:18:57 2013
InstallationDate: Installed on 2011-06-03 (862 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 11.04 "Natty Narwhal" - Release amd64 (20110427.1)
MarkForUpload: True
SourcePackage: tracker
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to saucy on 2013-10-02 (10 days ago)

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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