Package: gphoto2 Version: 2.1.5-1 Severity: normal
The story: A fairly old computer, with Pentium III CPU and a mere 128 MB of RAM. Debian Sarge for software. Before the recent summer vacation, I bought a new 512 MB CF card for my Cannon Power Shot A75. My two children take pictures, too, so this was a smart move. Coming back, that card is full to the brim. I fire up "gphoto2 -P" in a terminal window. This will take a while. So I start composing an email message in parallel. After some time, the email programm becomes very slow and unresponsive. There is also an increasing amount of hard disk activity. Finally, the "gphoto2" - process aborts, complaining about some USB communication problem with the camera. I think little about it. As I'm in no particular hurry, I delete all pictures that have already been downloaded, and fire "gphoto2" up again. Same story, at about the same picture (though not quite the identical one, I seem to recall). Now I start to pay attention. Who is causing all that hard disk activity? On the third attempt, a "top" quickly reveals: The "gphoto2" - process by and by eats up all available real and swap memory. When monitoring its memory vs. the progress it makes, it looks like it stores all pictures in RAM and never releases them. It seems, when the computer has become slow enough, for all the lack of memory, gphoto2 finally crashes. In this computer's setup, I roughly follow the old rule "swap space = twice real RAM". So together, real + swap are considerably less than the 512 MB of the CF card. Which is appearently what gphoto2 eats. Fortunately, I still have a few G of hard disk space in reserve. So, as a quick workaround, I temporarily opened up some more swap. As root: dd if=/dev/zero of=emergencyswap bs=1024k count=500 mkswap emergencyswap swapon emergencyswap That helped. I went to eat supper instead of watching the progress and memory consumption of gphoto2, but this time it goes through successfully. In my opinion, ghoto2 should release from memory the pictures after writing them to disk. Regards, and thank you for providing fine software, Andreas -- System Information: Debian Release: 3.1 Architecture: i386 (i686) Kernel: Linux 2.6.8-2-686 Locale: [EMAIL PROTECTED], [EMAIL PROTECTED] (charmap=UTF-8) Versions of packages gphoto2 depends on: ii libc6 2.3.2.ds1-22 GNU C Library: Shared libraries an ii libcdk4 4.9.9-4 C-based curses widget library ii libexif10 0.6.9-6 library to parse EXIF files ii libgphoto2-2 2.1.5-6 gphoto2 digital camera library ii libgphoto2-port0 2.1.5-6 gphoto2 digital camera port librar ii libjpeg62 6b-10 The Independent JPEG Group's JPEG ii libncurses5 5.4-4 Shared libraries for terminal hand ii libpopt0 1.7-5 lib for parsing cmdline parameters ii libreadline4 4.3-11 GNU readline and history libraries -- no debconf information
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