Beware "Personal launcher"

Hi,

Just noticed that "Personal launcher" applet (latest v0.6-4 in extras)
leaks like mad and updates the screen uselessly at high frequency.

Because it's an applet within the Desktop process which allocations are
guaranteed, it will cause device to run out of memory very soon. Result
is that other applications start aborting and device will slow down to
crawl. Constant screen updates (even when screen is blanked) drain
the battery.

Could this be kicked out of extras so that people don't "launch" their
devices to oblivion?


- Eero

On Thu, November 20, 2008 16:17, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,
Hi,
>
> Just noticed that "Personal launcher" applet (latest v0.6-4 in extras)
> leaks like mad and updates the screen uselessly at high frequency.
>
> Because it's an applet within the Desktop process which allocations are
> guaranteed, it will cause device to run out of memory very soon. Result is
> that other applications start aborting and device will slow down to crawl.
> Constant screen updates (even when screen is blanked) drain
> the battery.
>
> Could this be kicked out of extras so that people don't "launch" their
> devices to oblivion?
>

I've sent the author a mail. Let's see if he responds and fixes the issue.

As we have never had a case where we needed to do a 'demotion', I really
think we need to setup some procedures for this. Let's discuss what we
should do in cases like this.

>
> - Eero

--
Niels Breet
maemo.org webmaster

Hi,

ext Niels Breet wrote:
>> Just noticed that "Personal launcher" applet (latest v0.6-4 in extras)
>> leaks like mad and updates the screen uselessly at high frequency.
>>
>> Because it's an applet within the Desktop process which allocations are
>> guaranteed, it will cause device to run out of memory very soon. Result is
>> that other applications start aborting and device will slow down to crawl.
>> Constant screen updates (even when screen is blanked) drain
>> the battery.
>>
>> Could this be kicked out of extras so that people don't "launch" their
>> devices to oblivion?
>>
>
> I've sent the author a mail. Let's see if he responds and fixes the issue.
>
> As we have never had a case where we needed to do a 'demotion', I really
> think we need to setup some procedures for this. Let's discuss what we
> should do in cases like this.

Ideally there should be some quick memory leakage testing done[1] before
something enters into extras, at least if it's an applet or otherwise
always running.


- Eero

[1] E.g. using mem-monitor from sp-memusage package in tools repo.

On Thu, 2008-11-20 at 17:17 +0200, Eero Tamminen wrote:
> Hi,

[...]

> Could this be kicked out of extras so that people don't "launch" their
> devices to oblivion?

Calm down - this is not the app store (at least I hope so)

Get in touch with the author and fix the problem in a dialog.

--
Michael Flaig <mflaig@pro-linux.de>
PROLinux.de

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Hi,

Am Donnerstag 20 November 2008 schrieb Eero Tamminen:
> Could this be kicked out of extras so that people don't "launch" their
> devices to oblivion?
Just as a side note: I recently had this problem with the osso rss reader. It took
me some time to figure out that it was the rss feed reader eating my battery
with a 100% cpu load even after a reboot (i was in fact already searching
for a cheap replacement battery on ebay). Deleting the rss feed folder
under /home/user resolved my problem. I didn't even remember that i
ever used and i am not using the rss home applet. So i was pretty surprised
to see it running at all ... not to mention the 100% cpu load it did ...

I am not saying this to blame anyone. Instead i am saying that this hasn't
anything to do with the extras repo. You just cannot prevent these things.

I also think like already suggested here that the solution is some monitoring
mechanism. If one of those units has a process running at 100% cpu load
for more than a few minutes there's sure something going wrong. So this
is IMHO the only way address the problem.

Unfortunately there's no fan on the n8x0 becoming noisy if the device is under
heavy load. So even a simple thing like a taskbar icon indicating a high cpu
load and being able to present something similar to the windows task manager
might help. People are used to this task manager, so it should be possible
to have them using it. But then again in my case they still need to be able
to prevent the rss reader from doing the same again after the next reboot ...

Till

Hi,

ext Till Harbaum / Lists wrote:
> Just as a side note: I recently had this problem with the osso rss reader. It took
> me some time to figure out that it was the rss feed reader eating my battery
> with a 100% cpu load even after a reboot (i was in fact already searching
> for a cheap replacement battery on ebay). Deleting the rss feed folder
> under /home/user resolved my problem. I didn't even remember that i
> ever used and i am not using the rss home applet. So i was pretty surprised
> to see it running at all ... not to mention the 100% cpu load it did ...

Did you have automatic RSS updates enabled? which release you were
using?

I think one of the RSS feeds had something that put RSS feed reader
into a loop and it would be good to identify what that was. Do you
have the rss feed colder contents backed up somewhere?


> I also think like already suggested here that the solution is some monitoring
> mechanism. If one of those units has a process running at 100% cpu load
> for more than a few minutes there's sure something going wrong.

I think Youtube and some other Flash stuff can occasionally cause more
than few minutes of 100% CPU usage normally.


- Eero

Till Harbaum / Lists wrote:
> Unfortunately there's no fan on the n8x0 becoming noisy if the device is under
> heavy load. So even a simple thing like a taskbar icon indicating a high cpu
> load and being able to present something similar to the windows task manager
> might help.

osso-statusbar-cpu does exactly this. With memory reporting turned off
it is nice statusbar clock with black background. Once the background
turns solid blue you know there is a problem :-)

http://inz.fi/blog/category/geeky/maemo/maemo-hackers/osso-statusbar-cpu/
Chinook build works in diablo too
http://people.debian.org/~tschmidt/maemo/chinook/osso-statusbar-cpu/

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Frantisek Dufka wrote:
> osso-statusbar-cpu does exactly this. With memory reporting turned off
> it is nice statusbar clock with black background. Once the background
> turns solid blue you know there is a problem :-)

Actually it should have graphs of cpu and/or memory usage, not black
background; there's just a bug I haven't fixed that causes it to be
black by default. If you change the settings, it should start to work.

- --
Santtu
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Santtu Lakkala wrote:
> Frantisek Dufka wrote:
>> osso-statusbar-cpu does exactly this. With memory reporting turned off
>> it is nice statusbar clock with black background. Once the background
>> turns solid blue you know there is a problem :-)
>
> Actually it should have graphs of cpu and/or memory usage, not black
> background; there's just a bug I haven't fixed that causes it to be
> black by default. If you change the settings, it should start to work.
>

Sorry for the confusion, it does have graph of CPU usage. I don't see
any bug. I meant that in normal case CPU usage is pretty low so it is
mostly black.

BTW long time ago I got chinook version from
http://people.debian.org/~tschmidt/maemo/chinook/osso-statusbar-cpu/
Yesterday I noticed there is also 0.7.x (since June 2008) with
'official' chinook support in maemo-hackers.org repository
http://maemo-hackers.org/apt/pool/main/o/osso-statusbar-cpu/

Both of them work fine, they just look different. With default OS2008
theme I like a bit more the old 0.6.1 look with thin border :-)

Frantisek

Hi,

Am Montag 24 November 2008 schrieb Eero Tamminen:
> Did you have automatic RSS updates enabled? which release you were
> using?
This happened a few days ago with the latest diablo on n810 with all
updates installed.

> I think one of the RSS feeds had something that put RSS feed reader
> into a loop and it would be good to identify what that was. Do you
> have the rss feed colder contents backed up somewhere?
I am a bad tester ... i did not save anything. But i barely used the reader
and might be able to reproduce it. I'll give it a try.

> I think Youtube and some other Flash stuff can occasionally cause more
> than few minutes of 100% CPU usage normally.
That's right. This may be circumvented if such applications explicitely
register for this. Also mplayer may cause that.

Till