[maemo-users] Maemo IU locking up

[From: Eero Tamminen]

Hi,

ext Torsten Hoefler wrote:
> so, after some debugging time, I finally found the problem. It were the
> desktop applets (homeip and friends). I really liked them a lot because
> I like to have different status information (so I had all of them
> enabled). But they are kind of evil because:
> 1) they drain the battery (I never had more than one day standby, now,
>    after disabling them it's the 3-5 days that it should be)
> 2) they caused growing CPU load (by running maemo-launcher), I suspect
>    they executed scripts or sonething to gather their information
> 3) they caused the device to lock up UI-wise
> 4) they caused indeterministic reboots (watchdog) of the device
> 
> All those problems went away after I disabled the applets. Sad but true.

Please file bugs for these applications if they have a bug tracker
(or just complain at ITT forum if not :-)).

You can monitor what the desktop applets do when the desktop should
be idle with something like this:
	strace -p $(pidof hildon-desktop|cut -d' ' -f1)

If they process files or run scripts, that should be fairly clear
from the strace output.

For example if device has anything that constantly wakes up about once
a second or more often, that already reduces device use-time to one day
even if they wouldn't use network or do anything else besides just
waking up.  And waking up once a sec doesn't show up in "top" so you
need to use something like strace to see it on processes you suspect
of bad behavior.


Installing tools like strace is described here:
	http://maemo.org/development/tools/

You can also install & use ltrace, but its library call tracing doesn't
work properly for threaded or dlopen() using programs ("ltrace -S" does
the same thing as strace and tracing just system calls doesn't have any
issues).


	- Eero