Thank you for reporting this issue! I'm not sure what's going on here,
and I'm unable to reproduce it, so I'm hoping you are able to work with
me to help troubleshoot further, so I can figure out what's different
between your system and mine that's causing this issue for you and,
hopefully, how to fix or mitigate it.
Background: The apt-listchanges populate database job throttles itself
so that it does not consume a lot of CPU. In apt-listchanges 4.6, it
pauses whenever the load average gets above 1. In 4.7, the load average
limit has been increased to the number of CPUs in the machine, but that
still shouldn't let the machine get overloaded. So at first glance it
should not cause your system to run hot.
I just ran the 4.7 job start to finish and it consumed very little CPU.
I watched performance monitor while it was running and my total CPU
usage for all CPUs never got above 50% and most of the time it staying
under 25%. When the job finished and I continued to watch my CPU, it
wasn't much lower than while the job was running. In short, on my
computer, at least, this job doesn't consume a lot of CPU, so there's
more to investigate here.
From your report, it sounds like you're saying that the `apt-get -qq
changelog` command is the one you see consuming a lot of CPU? Do you see
that same command consume a lot of CPU if you run it from the command
line, i.e., not when the apt-listchanges populate database job runs it?
If so, then that may be the thing to explore here. That command would
normally be I/O-bound on the network, not CPU-bound, so I can't imagine
why it would ever consume a lot of CPU for any noticeable amount of
time. Also, the populate database job only runs that command for
packages that don't have any changelogs in /usr/share/doc, which should
be a minority of installed packages.
When you see that command consuming a lot of CPU, are you connected to
the network? Is there anything unusual about your network connection,
like is it particularly slow or unreliable? Is there anything unusual
about your computer, like does it have a particularly slow CPU?
Thanks again for reporting and for any help you are able to provide me
with getting to the bottom of this.
jik
