#1162 Lots of network and disk activity from RSS Bandit

[Albin Sunnanbo]

When running procmon from http://www.microsoft.com/technet/sysinternals/utilities/processmonitor.mspx to figure out why I have lots of disk activity on my system I found RSS Bandit to be among one the top disk users.

I include a short log of disk activity for RSS Bandit.
It looks like RSS Bandit writes down some of the feed icons to the cache three times per second. (Not all feed icons occurs in the logs.)

The trace.log prints some errors, could be related since they looks related to the icon-fetching.

------------ This is from <my profile="">\Application Data\RssBandit\trace.log --------------------
2007-11-12 21:05:41,515 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.danielmoth.com/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.0625000 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,515 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - ResponseCallback() web response OK: http://www.danielmoth.com/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,640 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.miranda-im.org/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.1875000 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,656 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.mozillazine.org/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.2031250 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,656 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - ResponseCallback() web response OK: http://www.mozillazine.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,671 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.inkscape.org/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.2187500 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,671 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.mozillazine.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,671 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - ResponseCallback() web response OK: http://www.inkscape.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,671 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.inkscape.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,687 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.danielmoth.com/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,687 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.miranda-im.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,687 [4184] ERROR RssBandit.RssBanditApplication [(null)] - OnThreadException() called
System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed.
at System.Uri.Parse()
at System.Uri..ctor(String uriString, Boolean dontEscape)
at System.Uri..ctor(String uriString)
at System.UriBuilder.get_Uri()
at NewsComponents.NewsHandler.RefreshFavicons()
at RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.WinGuiMain.OnAllAsyncUpdateFeedsFinished()
at RssBandit.RssBanditApplication.OnAllRequestsCompleted(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.InvokeMarshaledCallbacks()
2007-11-12 21:05:41,750 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.danielmoth.com/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.0625000 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,750 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - ResponseCallback() web response OK: http://www.danielmoth.com/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,875 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.miranda-im.org/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.1875000 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.mozillazine.org/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.2187500 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - ResponseCallback() web response OK: http://www.mozillazine.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - Request finalized. Request of 'http://www.inkscape.org/favicon.ico' took 00:00:00.2187500 seconds
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.mozillazine.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [1540] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.AsyncWebRequest [(null)] - ResponseCallback() web response OK: http://www.inkscape.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.inkscape.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.danielmoth.com/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [420] DEBUG NewsComponents.Net.RequestThread [(null)] - calling BeginGetResponse for http://www.miranda-im.org/favicon.ico
2007-11-12 21:05:41,890 [4184] ERROR RssBandit.RssBanditApplication [(null)] - OnThreadException() called
System.UriFormatException: Invalid URI: The hostname could not be parsed.
at System.Uri.Parse()
at System.Uri..ctor(String uriString, Boolean dontEscape)
at System.Uri..ctor(String uriString)
at System.UriBuilder.get_Uri()
at NewsComponents.NewsHandler.RefreshFavicons()
at RssBandit.WinGui.Forms.WinGuiMain.OnAllAsyncUpdateFeedsFinished()
at RssBandit.RssBanditApplication.OnAllRequestsCompleted(Object sender, EventArgs e)
at System.Windows.Forms.Control.InvokeMarshaledCallbacks()

[Albin Sunnanbo]

RSS_Bandit_DiskActivity

[Albin Sunnanbo]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1315576
Originator: YES

I attach parts of the file <my profile="">\Application Data\RssBandit\trace.log as trace.log since the pasted version above is quite unreadable after the line breaking.
This is duplicate information, but hopefully more easy to read.
File Added: trace.log

[Albin Sunnanbo]

trace.log

[Albin Sunnanbo]

Logged In: YES
user_id=1315576
Originator: YES

All that icon-fetching looks suspicious, and RSS Bandit is actually doing real fetching. RSS Bandit continually uses ~200kb/s download bandwidth for fetching the icons.

Workaround: Turn off "Use favicons as feed icons in Feed Subscriptions tree" option in Options->Display
If I turn that option off the download bandwidth drops down to zero.

[Dare Obasanjo]

Logged In: YES
user_id=24549
Originator: NO

Thanks for the detailed logs. It helped me track down the issue. It seems that in some cases if we cannot construct a valid favicon URL for a site, we end up throwing an exception before we set the flag that says we've attempted to download favicons. So we end up downloading favicons every couple of minutes continously.

The short term solution is to disable this feature. We will provide a version of RSS Bandit shortly that contains a roll up of various fixes.