Contacts temporarily disappear

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9

Contacts temporarily disappear

asked 2017-12-07 14:49:24 +0300

johanh
822 ●12 ●27 ●28

updated 2018-05-24 09:58:14 +0300

On Sailfish X, contacts sometimes disappear, but come back in a while. This is observed sometimes when unlocking the phone and opening the People app (but quite rarely). It happens mostly when receiving an incoming call (maybe 15% of the time). Then only the number is shown. After a while the contacts are back. The absence can be a few seconds or a few minutes at most.

My contacts are synced from Google. I've tried deleting all contacts and adding back, but it didn't help.

I guess this could be related to this case https://together.jolla.com/question/175382/bug-contacts-disappear-if-google-account-contact-sync-fails/

Wild guess. It feels like the DB is locked or something (maybe from syncing) and then the contacts can't be read.

Update. The problem has gotten worse and contactsd daemon is often running at 100% load, also quickly draining the battery. (but problem partly solved, see below).

Update 2 (2018-05-18).

I've looked at the problem again and noticed that the contacts DB grows for every sync. After enabling google contacts, initially the DB is smaller than 2 MB. Now for every sync it is growing. I looked at the sqlite DB and it is creating duplicates of addresses and names, emails etc. but mostly it is creating rows in the DeletedContacts table. After letting it run for a couple of months the contacts DB is several hundred Megabytes large (DeletedContacts 30.000+ rows). And google contacts haven't changed almost at all. It almost sounds like the sync tool thinks that contacts need to be deleted and are syncing them again.

Update 3 (2018-05-24).

Finally solved. See last answer below.

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on my aquafish, google sync takes quite a while - content disappears and reappears. on my Sailfish X, google sync works for contacts but not at all for events.

danfin ( 2017-12-07 16:03:48 +0300 )edit

I notice that also on Jolla C and it may have started before the last official upgrade My contacts are mostly from Google sync.

pat_o ( 2017-12-07 16:08:55 +0300 )edit

2

Turned out to be Whatsapp. <-- Wrong conclusion!

Update. And it began again. Looks like I have to permanently disable Android access to contacts. Or remove Whatsapp.

Update 2. Android acess to contacts has been turned off for a day, and now suddenly the phone is getting hot again (contactsd and google-contact alternating at 100% cpu load). This means that the problem is not Whatsapp or the Android layer. It is probably a problem with the data in google contacts. But how to debug it?

johanh ( 2018-01-13 00:07:36 +0300 )edit

Does it help, if you disable/remove Google Sync ?

Upp15 ( 2018-01-14 23:04:07 +0300 )edit

Of course, because then I have no contacts at all (all my contacts are synced from google).

johanh ( 2018-01-14 23:14:23 +0300 )edit

I have a similar problem using google sync. And this is not related to Android as I never used whatsapp and i have never checked the option for sharing contacts with android... But some contacts or part of contact details sometimes disappear. The only solution I found so far is to resync the whole google thing and contacts are all back...

pat_o ( 2018-01-15 14:38:42 +0300 )edit

3

Jolla support provided the following suggested solution: <-- That didn't help!

Delete google account (and any exchange account). 
devel-su 
systemctl --user stop contactsd.service 
rm -rf /home/nemo/.local/share/system/privileged/Contacts/qtcontacts-sqlite/*
reboot  
Check your contacts at Google that they look OK. 
Enable google account again and let it sync.

Been running for 17 hrs now and it looks good so far. But I'll keeping an eye on it for a couple of days (I still haven't enabled Android access to contacts either).

johanh ( 2018-01-16 09:22:54 +0300 )edit

on my aquafish, google sync takes quite a while - content disappears and reappears. on my Sailfish X, google sync works for contacts but not at all for events.
danfin ( 2017-12-07 16:03:48 +0300 )edit
I notice that also on Jolla C and it may have started before the last official upgrade My contacts are mostly from Google sync.
pat_o ( 2017-12-07 16:08:55 +0300 )edit
Turned out to be Whatsapp. <-- Wrong conclusion!
Update. And it began again. Looks like I have to permanently disable Android access to contacts. Or remove Whatsapp.
Update 2. Android acess to contacts has been turned off for a day, and now suddenly the phone is getting hot again (contactsd and google-contact alternating at 100% cpu load). This means that the problem is not Whatsapp or the Android layer. It is probably a problem with the data in google contacts. But how to debug it?
johanh ( 2018-01-13 00:07:36 +0300 )edit
Does it help, if you disable/remove Google Sync ?
Upp15 ( 2018-01-14 23:04:07 +0300 )edit
Of course, because then I have no contacts at all (all my contacts are synced from google).
johanh ( 2018-01-14 23:14:23 +0300 )edit
I have a similar problem using google sync. And this is not related to Android as I never used whatsapp and i have never checked the option for sharing contacts with android... But some contacts or part of contact details sometimes disappear. The only solution I found so far is to resync the whole google thing and contacts are all back...
pat_o ( 2018-01-15 14:38:42 +0300 )edit
Jolla support provided the following suggested solution: <-- That didn't help!
Delete google account (and any exchange account). devel-su systemctl --user stop contactsd.service rm -rf /home/nemo/.local/share/system/privileged/Contacts/qtcontacts-sqlite/* reboot Check your contacts at Google that they look OK. Enable google account again and let it sync.
Been running for 17 hrs now and it looks good so far. But I'll keeping an eye on it for a couple of days (I still haven't enabled Android access to contacts either).
johanh ( 2018-01-16 09:22:54 +0300 )edit

Accepted Answer

3

answered 2018-05-24 09:56:19 +0300

johanh
822 ●12 ●27 ●28

updated 2018-05-24 10:03:11 +0300

Finally solved.

In the end it was the data in my google contacts that was the problem. The contacts looked fine in web browser and in Sailfish and there were no duplicates. But when exporting the contacts from google contacts as a comma separated text file and examined in excel, there were several suspicious things.

The following things were discovered:

multiple line breaks within many address fields
data for some name fields were not in correct place, e.g. given name and surname offset one field to the right
of the offset names, some began with a space
duplicate emails, addresses and phone numbers in same row (for the same person)
a great amount of differing labels for a lot of fields (this I don't think matters, but cleaned it anyway)

When cleaning up everything, it finally looks like the endless deletion and re-synchronization in Sailfish has stopped.

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Great news, I will leave the question open for a while longer in case the problem shows up again.

nthn ( 2018-05-24 12:47:25 +0300 )edit

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