yelp takes a long time to load About This Document in the Desktop User Guide

[Eliah Kagan]

Binary package hint: yelp

On a Maverick amd64 system with yelp 2.30.1-0ubuntu1, ubuntu-docs 10.10.5, and gnome-user-guide 2.30.0+git20100403ubuntu2, I ran "yelp ghelp:user-guide". This system is affected by Bug 409706, but I waited several seconds until the CPU spike was over. Then I clicked "About This Document" on the right. (I have separately tried File > About This Document, which behaves the same, except as detailed below.) I have done this several times, and it almost always takes at least ten seconds to load. While loading, the CPU spikes to near 100%. During this time (and immediately before), my CPU is loaded to less than 10% by other non-niced processes. This is a slight annoyance on my system, but I imagine that this lag could cause serious problems on systems with slower CPU's.

Note that, unlike in Bug 409706, where the CPU spikes but the page is loaded and usable during the spike, in this bug, the page is not loaded until the spike is finished. (These bugs are also different in that one occurs when yelp is first run, while the other occurs when yelp loads a specific page. I am wondering if I should really be filing this bug against gnome-user-guide...but it seems to me that the cause of the lag is probably in yelp.)

I have also found that:

(1) After loading About This Document (by either means) and then browsing elsewhere, clicking "About This Document" in the File menu loads the About page immediately, without wait or excessive CPU usage, no matter what else has occurred in between.

(2) After loading About This Document (by either means), clicking another link in the bar on the right (for example, "Basic Skills") and then clicking "About This Document" again loads the About page immediately, without wait or excessive CPU usage.

(3) After loading About This Document (by either means), clicking the back button (or clicking N links and then clicking the back button N+1 times) and then clicking "About This Document" in the bar on the right (NOT from the File menu) produces the same wait time and CPU spike as occurred when loading the About page the first time.

I am able to reproduce this bug on a Maverick i386 system (with the same three package versons as on the amd64 system mentioned above), and also on a Natty i386 system with yelp 2.30.2-0ubuntu1, ubuntu-docs 10.10.4, and the same version of gnome-user-guide as on the Maverick systems (2.30.0+git20100403ubuntu2).

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 10.10
Package: yelp 2.30.1-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 2.6.35-24.42-generic 2.6.35.8
Uname: Linux 2.6.35-24-generic x86_64
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Dec 31 03:20:51 2010
ExecutablePath: /usr/bin/yelp
InstallationMedia: Xubuntu 10.04 "Lucid Lynx" - Beta amd64 (20100406)
ProcEnviron:
 LANGUAGE=en_US.utf8
 LANG=en_US.utf8
 LC_MESSAGES=en_US.utf8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: yelp

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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