Amarok scan collection _really_ memory hungry?

[Mark Kretschmann]

On Wednesday 25 April 2007, Corrin Lakeland wrote:
> I have recently shifted my music onto a remote server so I can use it on
> all my computers.  I initially tried SMB but am now using NFS.  When I
> go into amarok and rebuild the connection, amarok consumes far more RAM
> than the 1GB I have currently installed.
>
> It shoots up to 6GB fairly quickly, and then slowly goes up to 9GB where
> I got too impatient and killed it.  (For historical reasons, my machine
> has 20GB of swap so it wasn't close to running out of memory but it
> seems to actually be trying to use this memory - CPU usage is at 2%).
> It had got to 2/3 of the way through my collection when I last killed
> it.
>
> I then tried wiping .kde/share/apps/amarok and .kde/share/config/amarok*
> but restarting amarok still caused a freeze on startup ('amarok is
> taking a long time to start up, maybe something has gone wrong?')  The
> only way I was able to recover was with the command line --wizard which
> ran the first-time wizard again.  That's got it working again, but I'd
> prefer it to not break in the first place :)
>
> So, I appear to have worked around it by starting again and leaving it
> running overnight, but that hardly seems an easy solution.  Do people
> want me to do some further investigation as to why it is happening and
> if amarok can be changed? Or is it just a particularly degenerate case?
> I don't think amarok should attempt to consume more than 4GB of swap at
> worst - most users don't have that much swap + ram.

Well, this extreme memory usage is obviously not normal. It's probably choking 
on a specific file.

When it starts to freak out, kill Amarok, and then look at the file 
~/.kde/share/apps/amarok/collection_scan.log. The file that's listed in there 
is the last one that the scanner has processed - which is likely the culprit. 
Remove it from your collection.

--
Mark