On ownCloud Client Linux-Crashes

We had many reports on crashes due to exhaustion of file descriptors on Linux. When we started to look into them, we found that unfortunately they all have their cause in broken packages further down the dependency chain:

One confirmed leak is due to a bug in libgnutls/libgcrypt, which is not unload-safe and keeps opening /dev/random at every sync run. I added a workaround for this in 1.2.1, but that will only work if you have the unversioned .so files installed. Those are part of your distributions libgnutls-devel package.

The other leak we observed, which leaks sockets, has not finally be investigated, but seems to be related to gnome-keyring’s pkcs#11 support. Moving away /etc/pkcs11/modules/gnome-keyring-module works around the issue. We are on working proper fixes and/or getting in touch with the original authors and distro package maintainers.

I will update this post with more findings as they appear.