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Fri, 11 Feb 2005

Strange behaviour from liferea - 22:47
I have been using the liferea aggregator for a while now to read news feeds on my laptop. Tonight I noticed my laptop hard disk was doing a disk access every 5 seconds. As I did not have much software open I found this a surprise. In the end I tracked it down to liferea.

Wondering what was causing it I straced the program 

[22:35:10] 101 oneiros sjh ~>ps auxw | grep liferea
sjh 26098 0.1 1.9 49256 12416 pts/6 Sl 22:21 0:02 /usr/bin/liferea-bin
..
[22:35:19] 102 oneiros sjh ~>strace -tt -p 26098 -o /tmp/sout
Process 26098 attached - interrupt to quit
Process 26098 detached
[22:35:59] 103 oneiros sjh ~>egrep -v 'ioctl|gettimeofday|poll' /tmp/sout | less

Which gets rid of the stuff it is doing a lot of and leaves me with the remaining system calls and the time at which they happened. Looking at this there is something obvious happening every 5 seconds that would indeed cause a disk access. 

22:36:04.928666 mknod("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", S_IFIFO|0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
22:36:04.928740 open("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK) = 13
22:36:04.928783 read(13, "", 256)       = 0
22:36:04.928812 close(13)               = 0
...
22:36:09.928930 mknod("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", S_IFIFO|0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
22:36:09.928992 open("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK) = 13
22:36:09.929036 read(13, "", 256)       = 0
22:36:09.929065 close(13)               = 0
...
22:36:14.929187 mknod("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", S_IFIFO|0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
22:36:14.929253 open("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK) = 13
22:36:14.929296 read(13, "", 256)       = 0
22:36:14.929324 close(13)               = 0
...
22:36:19.929446 mknod("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", S_IFIFO|0600) = -1 EEXIST (File exists)
22:36:19.929502 open("/home/sjh/.liferea/new_subscription", O_RDONLY|O_NONBLOCK) = 13
22:36:19.929544 read(13, "", 256)       = 0
22:36:19.929572 close(13)               = 0

It is a named pipe, which could change the behaviour of disk activity but still, under normal circumstances the following would apply.

Because it closes the file every time the disk does a sync. I had a look through the config options for liferea and can not find one to tell it to stop doing that, of course I have the option to look at the source and find out why all this is happening, but for now I think I will just stay annoyed at it. Unless anyone knows how to stop this behaviour?

Update: As mentioned the Liferea emailed me and told me how to disable these updates and it has stopped the disc accesses.

There is a gconf option to disable the checking of this pipe.

If you want to do so set the boolean gconf key /apps/liferea/disable-subscription-pipe

I started up gconf-editor and hey presto there are more configuration options there, and this one worked. Thanks Lars.

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