Now this is a weird one: calibre kills my remote NX sessions...
I'm trying to run calibre on a (headless) server with a few GB of memory as this program is (very) memory-hungry and my poor Thinkpad T23 gets down to its knees just starting it.
Running calibre over a remote-forwarded ssh tunnel (with DISPLAY=localhost:10.0) works but is - as expected - slow.
To counter this slowness in remote X11 sessions I have cobbled up an alternative to straight tunneling using freenx. This alternative establishes a proxy agent on the client (which is the server on which I want to run calibre as I am talking in X11 terms here) which communicates with a proxy server on the X11 server (which runs on the Thinkpad) using the Nomachines protocol.
On the server calibre thinks it is talking to DISPLAY=:1000. All other X11 apps work (including complex ones - rootless gnome panel, VirtualBox, etc) but as soon as I start calibre the NX connection stalls. Usually calibre does not show up at all but I got a white, empty window names 'calibre' once. When the stall happens other remote clients from the same machine stall as well but they do not disappear - the NX agent and proxy are still running. Killing the proxy (on the X11 server machine - the notebook) puts the agent into a waiting mode from which it revives when a new connection attempt is made from the notebook, but only if calibre is killed on the server first. No errors are logged by either nxproxy or nxagent...
Running NX on another port (portnumber is 4000 + displaynumber) does not change this behaviour.
The connection breaks right after calibre complains about an undetected link:
Code:
frank@behemoth:~$ calibre
link hasn't been detected!
link hasn't been detected!
(the NX connection stalls... all clients freeze...)
Has anyone else ever tried to run calibre over NX? Has anyone else experienced these stalls (with or without NX)?
Does calibre do something specific (eg. close open files in a user session) which could cause this behaviour? The NX session runs in the normal user session so in principle it can be altered by any other program running under the same UID...