Tumblerd causes system crash (OOM)

[Jannis Pohlmann]

On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 09:36:02 -0800
Auke Kok <auke at foo-projects.org> wrote:

> On 02/16/2012 04:44 PM, Jannis Pohlmann wrote:
> > On Fri, 17 Feb 2012 00:58:18 +0100
> > Clemens Eisserer<linuxhippy at gmail.com>  wrote:
> >
> >> Hi,
> >>
> >> I already reported a problem with tumblerd some time ago (bug
> >> 8208), where it would keep file-descriptors open which made it
> >> impossible to unmount my external disk without killing it first.
> >> Unfourtunatly nothing has happend.
> >>
> >> However, recently I ran into much servere problems - when I change
> >> directory to my media folder using Thunar, tumblerd immediatly
> >> starts allocating huge amounts of memory and within a few seconds
> >> the OOM killer does its job and kills half of my system (including
> >> X of course).
> >>
> >> There really seem to be some outstanding bugs for
> >> tumblerd/gstreamer, is there any way to disable tumblerd/gstreamer
> >> interaction? Is there anything I can do, to get these bugs fixed,
> >> as they hurt user-experience quite a lot.
> >
> > What you can do is remove the gstreamer plugin
> > from /usr/share/lib/tumblerd (or /usr/local, depending on your
> > setup). I figure that we'll need to drop the GStreamer plugin and
> > replace it with something new. It's just too buggy and the code was
> > written by someone else who is not involved with Xfce or Tumbler
> > development at all.
> 
> That's a shame - gstreamer is the only multimedia framework that is 
> portable and written as a true component. I think we should try and
> work these bugs out, I have a very big preference to keep gstreamer
> as it's the only media framework that you will find on all distro's.

I'm not saying we should drop the idea of a GStreamer plugin but
rather *this* plugin. 

> Have you talked to Ross about the problems?

No, but I'd rather use code of which we know what it does. I don't want
to always have to poke on someone who is not actively keeping an eye on
things him- or herself.

> Is this using gst-ffmpeg or some other media plugin?

That does not really matter. After I merged the plugin, me and others
noticed severe mistakes with regards to the GStreamer usage. Also,
parts of the plugin are copy and pasted from another project. Despite
being concerned, I first thought this would be ok-ish, but now that
the plugins make tumbler crash for so many people, I realize it isn't.

So I'd rather replace the plugin with a new one whose code is
well-designed, -understood and -tested.

  - Jannis