Neroth/gnome-shell-extension-weather — Issue #2: No Internet causes gnome-shell to consume CPU
Author: hashstat
Created: 2012-02-09 00:12:03+00:00
State: open

This extension is great. But I ran into a problem when I disconnected my workstation from the network to perform some testing. gnome-shell slowly increased CPU utilization and memory consumption until the desktop appeared to hang and became unusable until gnome-shell was restarted.

Steps to reproduce the issue:

1. Disconnect all network cables and turn off wireless (if equipped)
1. Enable weather extension
1. Log out and back in
1. Monitor resource utilization using conky, top, or system monitor
1. Around the ten minute mark (on my systems anyway), the shell begins to exhibit signs of slowing down; CPU and memory utilization for gnome-shell are up
1. Within a few minutes, the desktop is no longer updating
1. Switch to virtual terminal 1 (Ctrl+Alt+F1)
1. Log in and replace gnome-shell: `DISPLAY=:0.0 gnome-shell --replace &`
1. Switch back to X console (Ctrl+Alt+F8)
1. Everything is back to normal for a while.

Disabling the weather extension fixes the problem. But then I don't have weather updates. :-(

I tested this on two systems; both are x86_64 systems running up-to-date installations of Arch Linux with the latest weather extension from the AUR (20120201-1). The first system is a Dell Precision T7500 workstation (dual, quad-core CPUs) with 12 GB of RAM. The second is a Dell XPS M1330 laptop with two cores and 4 GB of RAM.