[Bug 52405] Re: gnome-panel eats 50% cpu for half an hour and flickers

[Gustaf]

It seems the process is mostly opening and parsing the applications
folder in my home directory as well as the /etc/ one, and it is running
gettimeofday often too.

Having straced the process for about a minute I found a few thousand gettimeofday(), thousands of time(NULL), thousands of stat64 on application folders' files such as:
    622 stat64("/usr/share/gnome/apps/Games", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
    622 stat64("/usr/share/gnome/apps/Graphics", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
    622 stat64("/usr/share/gnome/apps/Internet", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
and thousands of weird stat64's, such as:
   3731 stat64("/home", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
   3732 stat64("/usr/share/gnome/apps", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
   3732 stat64("/usr/share/gnome", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
   6842 stat64("/usr/share", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=8192, ...}) = 0
   8086 stat64("/usr", {st_mode=S_IFDIR|0755, st_size=4096, ...}) = 0
where the number before stat64 is the number of calls during this minute.
It is _heavy_ file system querying, which offcourse is madness.

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gnome-panel eats 50% cpu for half an hour and flickers
https://launchpad.net/bugs/52405