ayatana-indicator-datetime-service takes all memory and CPU
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Today, when starting my x200 running aramo, after a few minutes, my laptop becomes hot, the fan blowing full speed and the disk LED heavily on. There is no way to regain control (trying to switch to console does not work) besides pressing the power button for several seconds until it switches off. I repeated the same 3 times.
I looked at processes and CPU and so the ayatana-indicator-datetime-service taking nearly 100% of the CPU and the amount of memory used growing rather fast. I killed the process before all memory was used and then the memory usage as shown by mate monitor immediately dropped form nearly 4 GB (the full memory) to less than 1GB. So I guess I lost control because the memory was getting full and the computer was massively using swap.
The only changes to my computer yesterday were upgrades and installing flatpak and gnome-software-plugin-flatpak which triggered the installation of gnome-software and a bunch if things.
Did anyone experience something like that?
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Exactly the same now happens on my t400 running aramo. I did not install gnome-software or flatpak there, so this was not the problem. Since that happens nearly at the same time on two independent computers, I suspect the problem comes from some software update.
If anyone has problems, run top in a terminal at session start, if something starting with ayatana is taking almost 100% CPU, kill it with "kill -9 pid" where pid is the numerical value in the first column.
EDIT: On another laptop with a fresh install of trisquel mini, no such problem. The two laptops were the problem occurs are running trisquel with mate desktop.
LXDE has its own in-house indicators. Which sounds like a good idea given the several ayatana-indicator glitches that have been reported here.
I uninstalled ayatana-indicator-datetime because I am using the Clock utility available in the MATE panel through "Add to panel". It is easier to configure and has options I find useful.
From the ayatana-indicator suite, I am mostly using -application, -keyboard, -power, -session and -sound. You may be able to turn them on and off if you install ayatana-settings, although it looked somewhat clunky when I tried it.
EDIT: ayatana-indicator-date > ayatana-indicator-datetime
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I also have the clock utility in the mate panel added by "Add to panel".
However, I have no clue whether I am actually using these ayatana indicators or not. How do you determine that?
Searching 'ayatana' in Synaptic will tell which ones are installed.
EDIT: searching 'ayatana-indicator' instead of just 'ayatana' may help trimming results.
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I see the installed packages (I used "dpkg -l ayatana* |grep ii") and with "ps -ef |grep ayatana" I see that they are running and were started by the mate-session process, but I have no clue whether I am actually using any program or mate applet or whatever that relies on them.
On my Trisquel 11 system, ayatana indicators are populating the MATE panel "Indicator applet" (see mate-indicator-applet).
EDIT: not to be confused with the "Notification area", which does just that and can also be added to the panel. The "Notification area" applet is not present on the MATE panel in a default Trisquel install, while either "Indicator applet" or "Indicator applet general" seems to be. Not sure which ayatana indicators are installed by default, though. From the screenshots it seems that -datetime, -sound and possibly -application (displaying network status) are.
NB: I believe you described those two applets in this post: https://trisquel.info/en/forum/trisquel-11-battery-indicator-words-were-nice-previous-version#comment-172145. "Indicator applet" has been translated as "Notification applet" in French, and is where the ayatana indicators are supposed to show.
Could it be that ayatana-indicator-datetime may be trying to sync with various online accounts and calendars? I see that it recommends evolution-data-server.
Since Trisquel does not allow this to happen by default, a recent update may have created a conflict somewhere. If you are not using it, the best course of action may be to uninstall it.
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I use evolution for emails (about a dozen accounts) and synchronisation of contacts and calendar to my radicale server. However, I never had anything from evolution in the notification area.
I decided to follow you suggestion and uninstalled ayatana-indicator-datetime. What made me hesitant is that so far, I have not uninstalled anything in the trisquel metapackage, so I still had that metapackage installed. I understand that there is no immediate consequence of uninstalling the trisquel metapackage but I was wondering whether there were circumstances in which it could matter.
On parabola with mate, I have an icon in the mate panel for evolution, I can minimize and restore the evolution window by clicking on it. By moving the pointer over that icon, I see some information but in my recollection, that information is not so interesting, I will check again next time I boot on parabola.
In any case, many thanks for your detailed explanations.
About a "recent update", in /var/log/apt/history.log there is nothing between July 20 and 26, and on 26, then the upgrades I have are the kernel, lib-linux-dev, libmysql and libldap. Nothing that looks so much related.
> On parabola with mate, I have an icon in the mate panel for evolution
This may be happening in the "Notification area" applet, in which case adding it to the MATE panel on your Trisquel system should make the evolution icon visible there too.
> libldap
This one lists evolution-data-server as a dependent package.
I was wondering whether there were circumstances in which it could matter.
If new packages are added to the default install, they will not be installed on your system. That may happen between releases, but you can reinstall the metapackages right before firing do-release-upgrade.
So as long as there is no new release to upgrade to, it makes no difference. Is that correct?
I installed ayatana-settings, which adds an "Indicators" entry in the Control Panel and in System > Preferences > Look and Feel. There you can select which of the installed indicators you want activated at log-in. That way you may not need to uninstall anything.
Uninstalled indicators are simply greyed out in the list, and there may not be an entry for all available indicators, installed or not. I believe ayatana means "work in progress" in classical Sanskrit.
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> Uninstalled indicators are simply greyed out in the list,
I see a tab for each indicator, characters of all the non-selected tabs are grey and when moving the pointer over the other tab, the characters become black if the indicator is intalled otherwise they remain grey.
At the bottom of the tab, there is an "activate this indicator at session start" button and one needs to understand that if the background is dark grey, it means activated and if it is light grey, it is not.
It took me a while to understand this, this interface feels terribly counter intuitive to me. I will try again and see if it works (I lost control of the computer once more).
I also found this interface not to be massively intuitive. With my current custom theme, at least the button shows blue vs. grey depending on whether the indicator is activated at startup or not, but clearly the text should also switch between "Activate" and "Deactivate", at the minimum. A checkbox or a switch button would be even clearer.
You can report the issue there: https://github.com/AyatanaIndicators/ayatana-settings/issues.
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I deactivated the date and time indication, I rebooted but it was started with the same problem. So I uninstalled the package again.
There are three potential issues to report: the interface, the date/time service going wrong, the start of the date/time service not being controlled by ayatana-settings. For the last two, no one besides me reported such issues so I'd rather try reproducing them on a virtual machine first.
> date/time service going wrong
This one should probably go to this tracker: https://github.com/AyatanaIndicators/ayatana-indicator-datetime, although it probably involves other packages too.
EDIT: I successfully deactivated various ayatana indicators by unchecking the corresponding box in "Startup Applications". This may explain why ayatana-settings is not installed by default.
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> I successfully deactivated various ayatana indicators by unchecking the corresponding box in "Startup Applications".
I see the ayatana indicators .desktop files in ~/.config/autostart but none of them appear in mate-session-properties. These .desktop files all have a line "NoDisplay=true" which no other .desktop file in ~/.config/autostart has, so I guess this is what make them not appear. Do your .desktop files for ayatana indicators have this line?
This is going largely beyond the initial issue but this is a rather useful thing to be aware of.
> Do your .desktop files for ayatana indicators have this line?
The "NoDisplay=true" line seems to be present in desktop files whenever there is no menu entry available. There is indeed a "show hidden elements" checkbox in Startup Applications, and all ayatana indicators are hidden if this is not checked.
As a side note, only the entries without a .desktop file in the autostart folder can be removed from the Startup Applications list. The others can only be checked/unchecked.
Note that the CPU usage problem may be related to calendar synchronization, which may be where evolution-data-server comes into the picture, possibly through that libldap upgrade. I would try to revert to the last aramo-security version of libldap (2.5.11...ubuntu3.1) and report the regression if reverting fixes the problem.
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