Bug 680456

Summary:	Desktop unusable due to prepare_preload using all available RAM after boot
Product:	[openSUSE] openSUSE 11.4	Reporter:	Mike Donald <mikeduck>
Component:	Other	Assignee:	Stephan Kulow <coolo>
Status:	RESOLVED WONTFIX	QA Contact:	E-mail List <qa-bugs>
Severity:	Normal
Priority:	P5 - None	CC:	anixx, crrodriguez, forgotten_KI1s17CsYK, forgotten_QFh0D9oMPg, mikeduck
Version:	Final
Target Milestone:	---
Hardware:	x86-64
OS:	SUSE Other
Whiteboard:
Found By:	---	Services Priority:
Business Priority:		Blocker:	---
Marketing QA Status:	---	IT Deployment:	---
Attachments:	screenshot

Description Mike Donald 2011-03-17 12:23:23 UTC

User-Agent:       Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:2.0b12) Gecko/20110222 Firefox/4.0b12

System takes a long time to boot and when the desktop loads it is unusable. The hard disk activity light is lit solidly. System Monitor reports no excessive CPU loading and only 290MB of RAM in use.
"top" reports that the process prepare_preload is using all available RAM (ie 2GB)
Does not happen with every boot. So far it has happened a total of 4 times in 5 reboots and one cold boot.

Reproducible: Sometimes

Steps to Reproduce:
1.any reboot
2.cold boot
3.
Actual Results:  
Problem existed 4 times out of 6.

Expected Results:  
Booted normally and given usable desktop in seconds.

I have installed gnome-shell and this creates a problem at the end of the text screens at boot time. The last line of text is
"failed to acquire org.gnome.displaymanager"
but the boot continues and loads the normal gnome desktop.

Comment 1 Ilya Chernykh 2011-03-17 21:43:06 UTC

The same problem. I cannot play games after system boot up for about 20 minutes until hard disk activity stops. This is due to background disk operations by 
services prepare_preload and tracker on 11.4. These services take about 30% 
of CPU load each. How can I disable them?

Comment 2 Cristian Rodríguez 2011-03-17 21:46:45 UTC

(In reply to comment #1)
> The same problem. I cannot play games after system boot up for about 20 minutes
> until hard disk activity stops. This is due to background disk operations by 
> services prepare_preload and tracker on 11.4. These services take about 30% 
> of CPU load each. How can I disable them?

zypper rm preload preload-kmp-desktop

zypper rm tracker

PS: Im not able to reproduce this bug.

Comment 3 Ilya Chernykh 2011-03-17 21:51:52 UTC

It is impossible to rm tracker. It suggests to remove and/or change archtecture for about 227 other packages, including yast2 and zypper.

Comment 4 Cristian Rodríguez 2011-03-17 21:58:09 UTC

(In reply to comment #3)
> It is impossible to rm tracker. It suggests to remove and/or change archtecture
> for about 227 other packages, including yast2 and zypper.

http://www.howtogeek.com/howto/linux/what-is-trackerd-and-why-is-it-running/ helps ? 

killing the process may also help.

Comment 5 Ilya Chernykh 2011-03-17 22:00:35 UTC

Created attachment 420070 [details]
screenshot

Comment 6 Mike Donald 2011-03-18 05:33:08 UTC

I removed preload/preload-kmp-desktop as advised.
I also removed tracker and associated packages, for good measure :-)
System is now booting normally again. Thanks.

Comment 7 Forgotten User QFh0D9oMPg 2011-06-05 03:58:14 UTC

I can reproduce this problem with Tumbleweed. However, it does not occur on every boot. Just had it a few times during the last week.

The process "preload" only consumes about 1%-2% of the CPU according to "top", however, the system is extremely sluggish (unusable) while this process is running. As soon as "preload" is finished, everything is smooth as usual.

Comment 8 Stephan Kulow 2011-09-01 11:43:21 UTC

I dropped preload for 12.1