-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Hash: SHA1 On 08/04/15 16:05, Adam Tauno Williams wrote:
On Wed, 2015-04-08 at 10:36 -0400, Anton Aylward wrote:
On 04/07/2015 09:47 AM, Bob Williams wrote:
I've had this problem off and on for several years, and over several iterations of openSUSE. My current setup is openSUSE 13.2 desktop with KDE5/plasma5. Graphics card is nVidia 9600GT running the latest nVidia proprietary drivers, driving twin monitors. Every so often, the system freezes for between 5 and 60 seconds.
Not this is not normal.
mouse cursor still moves, but windows won't scroll, desktops won't switch and often sound gets cutoff for the duration of the freexe-up. It's irritating, but not a show stopper. It would seem there may be some process that runs away every so often. Is there some file I can monitor or tail to catch it in the act.
Can you still switch virtual terminals? Ctrl-Alt-F1, for example? Often that still works when a system is "frozen" as the system is not frozen - the DE is frozen.
If so log in on tty1, run top, and go back to the DE and start working. Then when it freezes pop back to tty1 and see what is what? Might be informative, might not.
I think you're right about it being the Desktop Environment. The mouse cursor will move from side to side, but I cannot scroll the message pane in Thunderbird. I cannot switch between virtual desktops or open menus. But all this activity seems to get buffered, so when things come back to life, there is a flurry of activity as it catches up. I have set top running on virtual terminal 2. I previously ran it in konsole, but I guess as that's a GUI app it might not show me what's happening to the system. There is no increase in memory usage, swapping out or CPU hogging during these events.
There are a number of issues that might come into play, but it all gets back to the fact that Linux is not a Real Time Operating System with a guaranteed response time.
Hmmmm. A 5 to 60 second free is not an RTOS issue; some hardware or software in the system is a problem.
That mouse events, a very high priority, still respond, means your machine isn't dead :-)
Yep, the first part is to figure out what is actually "frozen".
I can repeat this phenomena. If I'm in eBay and visit a site and using Firefox, and click items to open them in a background tab, and do this a lot, then suddenly the machine freezes. If I kill Firefox the machine comes back. if, during that, I hot key out of X/KDE to a VT running root and use 'w' or 'top' I see I have a load factor of 10 ...1 ..12. 15...20 ...25 YIKES And I see that the amount of swap being used is rising ... Rising Conclusion: FF has a memory leak. Well actually on close examination, opening just one or two tabs, I see that it isn't actually FF but rather a plugin -- its the 'plugin container'
Oh, yeah. I've seen that. It would be nice if there were defined cgroups for common applications. Like just kill firefox if it or its children climb past 4GB.
As i said, what made UNIX revolutionary was that it broke away from the idea that a program had to encompass everything on one address space with all the threads and interactions etc which came with that approach. We seem to have rescinded this paradigm shift.
Ugh, this historical trope. (A) It was never true that UNIX/LINUX was nicely modular (B) Modern systems, include modern DEs like GNOME, are extremely modular and competent oriented - they just stitch things together [rather] seamlessly [when it works] (C) It doesn't matter either way in diagnosing a problem.
A problem plaguing LINUX desktops is that modern "PC" hardware is a cheap mish-mash of any-odd-thing.
- -- Bob Williams System: Linux 3.16.7-7-desktop Distro: openSUSE 13.2 (x86_64) with KDE Development Platform: 4.14.3 Uptime: 06:00am up 7:55, 3 users, load average: 0.16, 0.05, 0.06 -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v2 iEYEARECAAYFAlUlYOIACgkQ0Sr7eZJrmU7b7gCgqwDSzg1+hfNYwnbfFpRoQYj0 xYoAmwUszAzOYZ3C345nu7Tux5JnMFdZ =bm11 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- -- To unsubscribe, e-mail: opensuse+unsubscribe@opensuse.org To contact the owner, e-mail: opensuse+owner@opensuse.org