PackageKit and high CPU

[neill]

Hello there,

Running Mageia 2 up to date to Nov 2012 on a i686

If I leave my computer for 10-20 minutes and come back to it, it tends to be busy running packagekitd, lzma dispatcher (I think) and other stuff to do with package management. However, once it's started, it never seems to stop and takes up a lot of CPU time. In the end I'm forced to kill packagekitd.
From reading around, it seems packagekit can cause problems like this, and several people have said remove it.

However, if I type "urpme packagekit" it tells me that there are several other programs including gnome-shell that also need to be removed because of dependencies, and obviously I don't want to do that.

So my questions are
a) is there a way to stop it from being triggered when I am not using the computer (i.e. what is monitoring the computer that decides to start it up in the first place and how do I configure that?) Is there a way to turn it off?
b) if not a) should I keep it on the system, and if not, how do I remove it without removing all of the other things that seem to depend on it?

Thanks for any help

Best regards

Neill

[neill]

Ok no answers. I'll try a different set of questions

1) has anyone else experienced packageKitd spawning off lzma and urpmi dispatcher after leaving their computer for 10 minutes?

2) Did it take up stupid amounts of your CPU and not stop

3) Did you manage to resolve why it was doing it?

Seems like packageKitd should stay on the system but I want to understand why it's going wrong.

Failing all that, does anyone know who the right person at Mageia would be to ask about this?

Cheers

Neill

[martinw]

1) Yes.

2) The first time it ran after an install, it would take several minutes. Very noticeable on my notebook, because the fans went into overdrive due to the high CPU usage. Subsequently it took much less time, and now is barely noticeable. I guess it caches the information, and only has to look at packages that have been updated. I've never seen it fail to complete.

3) I think it is the service that informs you when updates are available. I have found no way to disable this.

How long have you left it running before killing it (and how fast is your machine)?

[neill]

Hi Martin

I think probably half an hour - the CPU goes up to 100% on one processor and my machine is about 7 years old - Intel® Pentium(R) 4 CPU 3.00GHz. I don't think it's my machine since it's been happily running Mageia (and previously Mandriva) since I've had it and didn't have the problem until Mageia 2 with the latest upgrades (mageia 2 was fine when it first came out). Also it quite happily runs the update program a few times a day.

The behaviour seems more like a program that's got itself in a loop and is unable to get itself out of the loop.

I'll try leaving it for ages to run next time it fires up (if I don't need the machine as it makes it fairly unusable) to see if it sorts itself out and will post back if it just looks like it's looping.

I'm wondering if maybe it's something to do with the repository setups being screwy? E.g. it's trying to talk to a machine that isn't replying properly. I'll try recreating the repositories and see if that helps.

Cheers

Neill

[doktor5000]

packagekit ist an alternative, desktop-agnostic and distro-agnostic framework to install packages. Both KDE and GNOME now bring along their
own implementations of software management. But as Mageia has an update applet and software management, you may want to disable that.
The gnome application is contained in package gnome-packagekit, the KDE one is called apper.

FWIW, lzma is used to decompress the hdlists (metadata about the packages in a Mageia repository) and urpmi is probably used
to update the repositories. It may take longer as those generic applications are not as optimized as the Mageia tools.

[neill]

Hi Doktor5000

Thank you for that reply. I've reloaded the repositories now, and weirdly enough the only dependency reported now if I try and remove packagekit is file-roller whereas before it was many things including gnome-shell.

So I think maybe the package information had gone wrong somehow and so will see if it behaves better now before removing it. I'll report back here either way for completeness of the thread.

If neither gnome nor KDE require it now, why is it included in Mageia?

BTW - is there a way to remove a single package without anything that claims to be dependent on it. I know this is a dangerous thing to do so this is more FMI I couldn't find anything in urpme to explain how to.

Best regards

Neill

[doktor5000]

If neither gnome nor KDE require it now, why is it included in Mageia?

Some programs can use it to automatically download needed codecs, programs or libraries. But the implementation is quite
unpolished and rather incomplete. Also it's rather superfluous, unless it's the only tool for software management.

BTW - is there a way to remove a single package without anything that claims to be dependent on it. I know this is a dangerous thing to do so this is more FMI I couldn't find anything in urpme to explain how to.

Yep, you can use

Code: Select all

rpm -e --nodeps packagename

it will not complain about any dependency, but just remove the package.
Although you should be knowing what you're doing if you use that, as you already noticed.

[neill]

Excellent - thank you for the help!

[neill]

Ok, it carried on doing it so I've removed packagekit using

rpm -e --nodeps packagekit

and will see if that causes any problems.

Meanwhile thanks for the help!

[dedanna1029]

So, so glad to have seen this. It's the exact same problem I'm having now; the two (urpmi-dispatch & lzma) have been running at over 100% CPU for several hours. I'm going to stop the processes, and remove packagekit.

Thanks so much, Neill, for asking about this, or my netbook would be going completely insane all night. As it is, I can stop it now. My CPU and fan both thank you very much.

Edit: Sorry, I'm having issues with this. I can't get the two processes to stop, even with kill -9, and also I'm having issues getting some packagekit components uninstalled. I'm wondering if I'd have very negative effects uninstalling these things with rpm -e --nodeps:

Code: Select all

[root@dedanna ~]# rpm -qa | grep packagekit
packagekit-gtk3-module-0.6.21-3.mga2
libpackagekit-glib14-0.6.21-3.mga2
packagekit-0.6.21-3.mga2
gnome-packagekit-common-3.4.0-1.mga2
packagekit-gstreamer-plugin-0.6.21-3.mga2

Here's the effect of uninstalling one of them:

Code: Select all

[root@dedanna ~]# urpme packagekit-gtk3-module
To satisfy dependencies, the following 5 packages will be removed (14MB):
  gnome-panel-3.4.1-1.mga2.i586
   (due to missing gnome-shell)
  gnome-shell-3.4.1-1.mga2.i586
   (due to missing packagekit-gtk3-module)
  gnome-tweak-tool-3.3.4-1.mga2.noarch
   (due to missing gnome-shell)
  packagekit-gtk3-module-0.6.21-3.mga2.i586
  task-gnome-minimal-3.4.1-4.mga2.noarch
   (due to unsatisfied gnome-panel >= 3.1.0)
Remove 5 packages? (y/N) n

Thanks so much!