some thoughts upon analysis of /usr/share/apport/apport:

- apport does have support for blacklisting crash reporting for specific 
programs.  For programs that are critical for the UI on the phone and which 
cause a hard lockup of the UI while the crash report is running, we could use 
this blacklist as a workaround.
- apport currently calls os.nice(10) to avoid interfering with the running 
system while processing the crash file.  This is counterproductive when the 
process being retraced is critical to the system.
- apport's crash dump handling is already carefully written to avoid 
bottlenecks in either memory or disk writes (the crash dump is read from the 
kernel 1MB at a time, compressed, and written to the crash file); this should 
already be close to optimal (1MB may not be the optimal write block size, but 
it will compress to variable size anyway and we're not flushing the disk 
between writes so the kernel should do a better job of optimizing for us).  
Thus, aside from possibly dropping the call to os.nice(), I confirm that 
there's not much of anywhere for us to go in improving the performance of the 
crash handler.  The only other thing that might improve performance is for the 
crashing process to simply have less mapped into memory at crash time - I guess 
that a crash dump of the unity system compositor would be quite large due to 
having graphics buffers mapped into memory?

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https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1278780

Title:
  apport takes too long to write crash report, appears to lock up phone

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