Re: nautilus problem

[Alexander Larsson <alexl redhat com>]

On Sun, 2008-12-14 at 03:13 +0100, Håkon Wium Lie wrote:
> I'm having a problem with nautilus that I hope someone can help me
> with: nautilus takes up much of the performance on my machine, anywhere
> from 20% to 80%, as reported by 'top'.
> 
> I'm using Ubuntu 8.10 on a Thinkpad X41. I recently upgraded from
> Ubuntu 8.04 to fix the behavior described above, but the problem
> persists. At some point, nautilus and evince-thumbnailer both took up
> performance and I've therefore disabled the generation of thumbnails
> (using gconf-editor to set desktop/gnome/thumbnailers/disable_all).
> However, nautilus still takes up perfomance of its own. I'm not using
> nautilus as my file manager (I use Opera, emacs and xterm :) so I
> don't see any reasons why nautilus should demand much. Using strace,
> I've recorded lots of these:
> 
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 103634987}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 103804003}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 103972111}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 104160962}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 104330537}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 104498295}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 104668149}) = 0
>   clock_gettime(CLOCK_MONOTONIC, {75791, 104843451}) = 0
> 
> I've deleted ~/.nautilus to try remove any settings that could cause
> the behavior. 
> 
> When running nautilus manually, I get this output:
> 
>   Initializing nautilus-share extension
>   seahorse nautilus module initialized
> 
>   ** (nautilus:26661): WARNING **: Unable to add monitor: Not supported
>   Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory
>   Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing.
> 
> Help is appreciated.

Both of these are harmless. 

The easiest way to get a quick look at whats happening is to connect to
nautilus with gdb. Make sure you install the debug info package for
nautilus, glib and gtk+, then:

* attach to nautilus (gdk attach $pid)
* run "continue" in gdb
* do whatever you do that makes nautilus use cpu when you 
  think it should be idle
loop:
* go to the gdb window, press ctrl-c
* type "bt" in gdb
* "continue"
* goto loop, a few times

This gets you a quick look at what its doing most of the time. If you
post this output we should be able to see whats going on (unless you see
it yourself).