Strange bug in F14: gnome-settings-daemon, Firefox ramp up to high CPU usage

[Peter Robinson]

On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Adam Williamson <awilliam at redhat.com> wrote:
> Hi, folks. Before I file a bug on this I was wondering if anyone else
> had seen it and hoping to get a better idea of exactly what's happening.
>
> Lately, on this machine - a laptop running F14 - it seems that every so
> often, gnome-settings-daemon, firefox and one other process (I forget
> which, something else that's part of GNOME I think) suddenly go crazy,
> pegging out the CPU (which is dual-core) entirely and also showing huge
> virtual size (virt column in top) - in the 60-70GB range. One thing that
> sometimes triggers this is, sometimes, trying to play some music in
> audacious; usually it works, but sometimes it returns 'input/output
> error', PulseAudio crashes, and this bug happens immediately. But
> sometimes the same problem with gnome-settings-daemon and firefox
> happens without being triggered by loading music.
>
> Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas what's going on?

I've seen this issue earlier in the Fedora release cycle. I saw is
with g-s-d plus a bunch of random apps including (from mem) firefox,
evolution, pidgin etc. This is a dual core i5 with hyperthreading (OS
sees 4 cpus). It seemed that it was mostly due to constraints on RAM
and I think it was made worse by the fact that I run a LUKS encrypted
disk as it made matters worse when things had to swap. The problem
improved greatly when I went from 2 to 3 gig of ram and I rarely see
it now I have 4 (not that its an excuse), I don't think the problems
fixed.

Oeter