[plug] odd file manager hangs

[James Devenish]

In message <41230784.8070208 at postnewspapers.com.au>
on Wed, Aug 18, 2004 at 03:38:44PM +0800, Craig Ringer wrote:
> So of course, now that I've posted I manage to catch it.

Before you posted this, I was going to suggest that maybe the graphical
browsers 'lock' each other when generating thumbnails (for instance). I
know that this seems unlikely, but I wasn't sure if you'd discounted it
yet. While I can't explain how a race condition might crop up, at least
it might have given you somewhere to look. I don't use graphical file
browsers often, so I don't really know what they do behind your back.

> craig    25840 25820 T finish_stop       nautilus --no-desktop

Now, we've seen finish_stop before, haven't we? I don't know of its
significance (or lack thereof), but it seems to crop up in your e-mails
when you have these problems. Maybe it's just because of strace? I don't
know.

> The trace flag on 25840 is odd, but I think that's left over from when I 
> attached strace to it earlier - I don't think it was present 
> initially. When traced, 25840 appears to be looping over:
> 
> poll([{fd=21, events=POLLIN}], 1, 2000) = 0
[...]
> that pipe is attached to:
> nautilus  25841    craig   21r  FIFO        0,7             8476683 pipe
> nautilus  25841    craig   22w  FIFO        0,7             8476683 pipe

So...you say that 25841 is "not doing anything"? Is it doing a different
type of "nothing" to all the other children of 25840? I don't know if
I've understood the situation correctly, but is the parent waiting for
I/O from its child? If so, I would wonder what is wrong with the child.
Does the parent "free up" when you kill the child? (I guess this will be
your last resort.)