Incorrect Import Attempt Survives Restarts, Reboots and Re-Installs...
Submitted by sad..@..il.com
Link to original bug (#773818)
Description
Hardware:- Asus z170i Pro Gaming Motherboard Intel Core i7 6700T Skylake CPU 16Gb Crucial RAM Onboard Realtek Audio Samsung 1Tb 850 Pro SSD
Software:-
- Windows 10 Pro 64-Bit Clean, brand-new installation of Win10 to a new, 512Gb "C:" [Primary] partition, front of HDD. [Small "boot" partition automatically created by Installer
- Mint Linux 18.0 / 64-Bit Clean, brand new installation of Mint 18 to a set of new ext4 [Logical] partitions, following on immediately from "C". [Remaining drive space, approx 360Gb, formatted as single NTFS volume to be shared between OS.
Installation of Rhythmbox performed directly from Mint apt repositories.
Description of Fault / Symptoms Upon launch of Rhythmbox, the main program window is observed to open and remain stable. A "top" session, running in an open console window, shows the program activate, consume a small amount of CPU in setup, then go idle.
Approximately 5-10 seconds after entering idle mode, the CPU consumption of the "rhythmbox" thread expands to ~ 100% [of a single core]. Sometimes this dips to 85-90%, other times it can extend to as much as 140%. Additionally, a second thread, "rhythmbox-meta" is launched. This thread consumes significantly less CPU - only about 60-80% - but easily sufficient for these 2 threads to be steadily ranked 1 & 2 by "top".
At the same time that these 2 threads become highly active, there is a significant increase in drive head activity from my NAS boxes. I have 2 QNAP NAS enclosures, a TS-459 Pro II and a TS-670 Pro, both connected to this computer. Under Mint the connection uses NFS.
When I check the main display for Rhythmbox, I can see that a new entry, "Import Errors", appears in the left panel. [ Except, I did not ask Rhythmbox to attempt to import anything - I just launched the application ]. When I then check the individual errors, I can see that Rhythmbox appears to be parsing every single folder within both of my NAS boxes - and the error messages are appearing because it does not recognise files such as my photo library as music... It is difficult to estimate the veracity of the import, but my Mint "System" Monitor is showing an inbound network data volume that is irregular [no fixed pattern] and varying from 6-24MB/s.
If I then terminate Rhythmbox using the "close window" / Quit Application feature, the main window exits but both the "rhythmbox" and "rhythmbox-metad" processes continue to rack up considerable CPU time. Former still at ~ 100%, latter at ~ 60%. "kill" and the PID of the rhythmbox process cancels both and drops the machine back to idle, terminates all network traffic.
It is possible [I honestly do not know either way] that when I very first installed Rhythmbox, that I commenced the import function in the wrong directory, i.e. my home folder [which has softlinks to both NAS boxes].
fstab entries:-
QNAP TS-459 Pro II
192.168.1.41:Public /media/459 nfs rw,hard,intr 0 2
QNAP TS-670 Pro
192.168.1.42:Public /media/670 nfs rw,hard,intr 0 2
"local" maps to NAS in my home folder:- lrwxrwxrwx 1 clive clive 10 Oct 29 23:24 459 -> /media/459 lrwxrwxrwx 1 clive clive 10 Oct 29 23:23 670 -> /media/670
Actual Maps to NAS boxes in the /media folder:- drwxr-xr-x 10 clive clive 4096 Apr 9 2016 459 drwxr-xr-x 9 clive clive 4096 Sep 26 23:00 670
However, since observing this issue, I have attempted to clear the fault, without success, through the following reset strategies:-
- Quit and restart application
- Quit application, remove all local configuration files from personal home directory and restart...
- Quit application, remove all local configuration files from personal home directory, reboot computer and restart...
- Quit application, remove all local configuration files from personal home directory, un-install the application using Synaptic, reboot the computer, re-install the application and restart...
- Quit application, remove all local configuration files, un-install using Synaptic and the "complete removal" option, reboot the computer, re-install and restart...
- Left the import process running, just to see what happens. After 8 hours it had imported a nonsensical and random selection of audio files from my NAS servers. Nonsensical in that when it found the folder containing 4 albums by David Gray, it took the first track from one album [White Ladder] and ignored the rest. [ ALL music created by importing physical CDs, via iTunes, in Apple Lossless format]. The import "found" approximately 2,000 audio files out of a total of 11,300...
I have been using Rhythmbox as my personal music player since 2004/2005, when I first migrated to ubuntu [Hoary Hedgehog] from Mandriva Linux...Never seen this before...
I have also tested importing my music library into Banshee music player [to test file integrity]. Works perfectly. Instantaneous import, zero errors, perfect playback...
I have also checked syslog and see the following reported errors:- cat syslog | grep rhythmbox Oct 31 21:22:25 skylake kernel: [ 742.700310] rhythmbox[2918]: segfault at 0 ip 00007fb6888a04ef sp 00007ffd1ff116b0 error 4 in librhythmbox-core.so.9.0.0[7fb6887db000+13e000] Oct 31 22:16:36 skylake kernel: [ 3993.244391] rhythmbox[3900]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f3b3c2fe4ef sp 00007ffdcf495530 error 4 in librhythmbox-core.so.9.0.0[7f3b3c239000+13e000] Oct 31 22:17:11 skylake kernel: [ 4028.351520] rhythmbox[4275]: segfault at 0 ip 00007fcbe5b904ef sp 00007ffffed8b840 error 4 in librhythmbox-core.so.9.0.0[7fcbe5acb000+13e000] Oct 31 22:21:44 skylake kernel: [ 4301.536302] rhythmbox[5354]: segfault at 0 ip 00007f35643d94ef sp 00007fff80bad710 error 4 in librhythmbox-core.so.9.0.0[7f3564314000+13e000]
Lastly, I have attempted more-or-less the same process into a different computer, also running Mint 18.0/64-bit. On the "other" computer [which had no Windows 10 co-existing] there were zero issues.
My conclusions are that one of the following conditions are likely true:-
-
There is a hidden or currently unidentified configuration file, used by Rhythmbox, that is preserving the "import request" from an earlier attempt, across reboots and rebuilds.
-
There is a bug in the rhythmbox program that encounters a condition or setting on this specific instance of Mint that it does not like, and which causes this odd behavior.
-
There is a configuration change between Mint 17.3 and Mint 18.0 on this hardware, which has resulted in this change to observed behaviors.
-
I have entered the twilight zone.
I am quite happy to experiment further if the above description is incomplete or unhelpful. I can run Brasero music player in the interim, even though I would like to resolve this problem.
The only other thing I can think of doing is "take off and nuke it from orbit", in other words perform a clean installation of Mint, reformatting all the partitions and starting again from scratch. All my data is held on my NAS box - and I can still access Mint on my other machine - so I can afford to take the time to experiment and get this right.
Anything you can do to help would be gratefully appreciated.
I am so very sorry for such a long bug report, but I hope that it was worth giving you the amount of detail provided here.
Please let me know if you need any more information, or would like me to run any specific tests...
Thank you
Clive
Version: 3.4