[Shotwell] shotwell freezing shortly after startup

[Dougie Nisbet <dougie highmoor co uk>]

I sent the following to the old address:

I've been running 0.20.0 since release on Debian Testing. I usually try and have meaningful filenames for images and have experimented with various approaches of renaming images, which I've touched upon in older discussions.

One thing I've tried with varying success is to rename images in place and trust shotwell to sort itself out as it continuously monitors my library. Not very elegant, but if it works I'm not too worried. I tried renaming two images in place earlier (I exited shotwell first). When I started shotwell again it initially looked fine but has frozen after startup. The thumbnails appear but thereafter it is unresponsive. If I click on the shotwell window and then try and click on something else the desktop itself freezes for a time (~5-30 seconds).

Normally when I start shotwell I start it in foreground in a terminal window on its own, then in another terminal window run 'tail -f .cache/shotwell/shotwell.log' to get an idea of what is going on. This isn't shedding any light on the matter in this case. So ...

1. What might be wrong?
2. Is there a debug option to start shotwell that might give me more information?

Having read the other thread about 100% usage I've checked 'top' but CPU usage by shotwell isn't significant.

and while I was wondering why it hadn't appeared, I tried:

    deleting ~/.local/share/shotwell

    moving my images folder somewhere else (mv /store1/images /store1/out_of_the_way)

    re-installing shotwell

in each case the symptoms are the same - shotwell starts, is responsive for about 30 seconds, then freezes.

I've looked back through the list and found some debugging advice. At the moment I've tried starting shotwell like so:

    SHOTWELL_LOG=1 shotwell

and watching the log file to see what happens at the point it freezes. In the terminal window where shotwell starts I see:

dougie skye:~$ SHOTWELL_LOG=1 shotwell

** (shotwell:27439): WARNING **: Couldn't register with accessibility bus: Did not receive a reply. Possible causes include: the remote application did not send a reply, the message bus security policy blocked the reply, the reply timeout expired, or the network connection was broken.

(shotwell:27439): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: The property GtkSettings:gtk-menu-images is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.

(shotwell:27439): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: The property GtkButton:use-stock is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.

(shotwell:27439): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: The property GtkSettings:gtk-button-images is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.

(shotwell:27439): GLib-GObject-WARNING **: The property GtkImageMenuItem:accel-group is deprecated and shouldn't be used anymore. It will be removed in a future version.

and in the log file, at the point that shotwell seems to freeze I see:

L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:44 [MSG] main.vala:43: Verifying database ...
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:44 [DBG] Db.vala:40: Database schema version 20 created by app version 0.20.0
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:44 [DBG] Upgrades.vala:85: Could not delete mimics: /home/dougie/.local/share/shotwell/mimics is not a directory
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] ConfigurationInterfaces.vala:331: ConfigurationFacade: engine reports property 'DISPLAY_BASIC_PROPERTIES' changed.
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] ConfigurationInterfaces.vala:331: ConfigurationFacade: engine reports property 'DISPLAY_SEARCH_BAR' changed.
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] ConfigurationInterfaces.vala:331: ConfigurationFacade: engine reports property 'EVENTS_SORT_ASCENDING' changed.
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] LibraryWindow.vala:275: on_library_monitor_installed: /store1/images
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] ConfigurationInterfaces.vala:331: ConfigurationFacade: engine reports property 'DISPLAY_SIDEBAR' changed.
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] ConfigurationInterfaces.vala:331: ConfigurationFacade: engine reports property 'SHOW_WELCOME_DIALOG' changed.
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:57:45 [DBG] main.vala:195: 1.431315 seconds to Gtk.main()
L 27439 2014-10-01 19:58:32 [WRN] Directory PentaxDng, entry 0x0004: Data area exceeds data buffer, ignoring it.

I'm going to have another read of https://wiki.gnome.org/Apps/Shotwell/ReportingABug and try the gdb thing.

Dougie