Re: [Evolution] stability/stability

[Paul Smith <paul mad-scientist us>]

On Sun, 2009-10-11 at 16:21 -0700, Jonathan Ryshpan wrote:
> > Also, when mentioning a BZ report here on the list it's conventional to
> > give the bug number (or better, the URL of the BZ page) in case someone
> > wants to add anything.
>
> Also quite right.  It's bug 528393.
>       https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=528393

Although you think you have nothing useful to add, in fact you have a
wealth of information you _should_ provide in this bug (indeed, in every
bug reported, for any program); this is especially critical if you can't
narrow the problem down to a particular area based on its behavior:

Most importantly, you MUST always describe your environment completely:
for Evo in particular this means what type of email are you reading?
Local spool?  POP/POP3?  IMAP?  Exchange using the old
evolution-exchange backend?  Exchange using the new evolution-mapi
backend?  What is your mail store: standard/maildir/etc.?  Do you attach
to any special calendar, or do you just use local calendars?  Have you
configured an LDAP server for contacts, or just local contacts?  Any
special plugins you've installed?  Are your mail folders unusually
large?  Do you have lots of filters or complex filters?

Is anything "common" about when Evo freezes?  When it freezes, is it
always when you click Send/Receive?  Only happens when you're reading
mail?  Responding to mail?  Does it happen even when you're not
interacting with the application at all?  Are there messages in the
system log?  Are there messages in your session log (often
~/.xsession-errors, although I don't know about Fedora)?

If you use "top" or some other tool to view the system load, is
evolution or evolution-data-server, etc., still using CPU/using lots of
CPU (e.g. is it spinning, or waiting)?  What about RAM?

There are debugging flags, etc. you could enable as well that are
described on the web site, but that's more advanced work.  There are
other advanced techniques such as using strace, forcing a core dump, or
attaching to the running process with a debugger.  If you know how to do
these things that's very helpful; if not someone may ask you to do them
(and explain how) in response to your bug.  However, the information
similar to the above should be basic detail provided with every bug
report.


HTH!