Desktop freezes

[dedanna1029]

Can it really be something that simple? I am not thinking it's something eating RAM or CPU usage (unless it's plasma-desktop itself). When it happens, I go to Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or whatever for tty), and try to login with my user to run top. Soon as I put my password in and hit the enter key, tty just hangs there and hangs there, never gets to the prompt. So, I try another regular user on another tty to login to on the system, and that does the same. Everything freezes user-wise, even tty and terminals. The panel freezes, desktop icons freeze. The only single thing that doesn't hard freeze, is the mouse and being able to move it around, which is really ironic, because everything you can click on is frozen! KSysGuard will freeze if used so it will give no useful information (it will be hard frozen and won't be able to because it's GUI and part of the desktop that's freezing), and would do nothing anyway even if it didn't freeze, that top or htop couldn't do in this case.

If I login to tty as root, it's fine, and I can use it just fine; however, top is of no help from root (it doesn't show all of the user processes that are running), except that plasma-desktop is consistently at the top of the list when it happens (and it happens randomly, for user z and I both, it seems):

although this time I was able to determine that it is just the KDE desktop that freezes

... which is exactly right.

The only option I'm given to use from there to be able to do anything at all, is Alt+SysRq+RSEIUB, unless I give the reboot command from root in tty, and I prefer to at least try to sync first. Even killall X doesn't work. Most of the time your login screen won't even come up after this with killall X - tty hangs. Then, on the boot from that, it runs umpteen billion transactions it seems, from replaying journal (I'm on reiserfs, and refuse to budge from it even though it's actually outdated), then when I go into KDE desktop from there, it runs like total complete sh!te. Slow as a turtle on the best weed since it was first planted, for at least the next three reboots of the machine.

I use several different programs in the desktop; a couple being KDE ones, others being ones that are either desktop-independent or gtk-based. plasma-desktop crashes on any/all of these that I'm running. It is that random. The only single other thing in top that is high on the list (second in order) is X, which makes sense that it would. The programs themselves (or even just "program", a single one; yes, it does this with only one running sometimes) is not very high on the list at all. Keep in mind, this top is from a root terminal. I'm unable to get to anything else.

I'm quite seriously debating on filing a bug on this, if one isn't filed yet.

[ghmitch]

Dedanna, In your case I would suggest you use a NON-KDE desktop to get access to the Control Center and create a NEW tempory user and see if you encounter the same problems logging in on KDE on that account. This is isolate whether this is a global KDE problem or is associated with something going on at a user level. - George

[dedanna1029]

As I've stated before in this thread, it not only happens on my netbook. It also happens on a Lenovo laptop that we have here running M3B4, and on an old server's desktop, all of which run KDE (normally) fine, the latter two are running M2.
This is obviously not, therefore, user-specific, although I have already tried resetting ~/.KDE4 on my own desktop. It froze right after the reboot from doing that. Multiple users, multiple machines.

[dedanna1029]

My intention here is not to complain or whine, or anything else about this issue here. My intention is to back up z's very very similar (if not same) issue, and others who have posted to this thread, by giving a vebally graphic description of what happens with it, that others are not seeing from the "outside". Also to give z an idea of what can be done when it happens, so if z thinks it may be a bug too, it can be filed one if not filed. It gives more information for that. Those are the only intentions, and to state categorically that it is plasma-desktop that's crashing. There is no if and or but about that.

I do believe also, that if Mageia would update KDE for Mageia 2, until 3 is released (for those who are not prepared to run Cauldron yet), it would help matters tremendously. It could even fix this issue (although it is still happening on the Lenovo). 4.8.5 for M2 is a quite old version by now. There have been NO KDE updates since I installed M2 to the netbook and server.

[VoodooDali]

Agh! *smacking myself in the head* I totally spaced that M3 was running KDE 4.10 and M2 was not. I see the possible connection now.

[ghmitch]

I am running M3B4 here. I have had one problem with desktop freezing so far. It turned out to be akonadi eating up all the 4G of system RAM in a matter of seconds. I simply went to console as root and typed `rpm -e --nodeps akonadi` ,,, problem solved. In the past I have had similar problems with nepomuk and various plasmoids. As a result I am not using nepomuk, although it is still installed, I have reinstalled akonadi ... only after making sure it was pretty much nuetered and I DON'T use plasmoids ... period. They are not worth the pain for me. I use a computer to get things done, not to be jerked around by my toys. I have been off of M2 for over two weeks now so I don't know what is going on in that realm. KDE is FAMOUS for freezing up. I had the problem a lot beforre in M2 with Dolphin AND Firefox. Firefox is also famous for freezing the system. I am absolutely convinced that Firefox has had memory leaks for years and still has them. If I put multiple instances of Firefox up on websites that include java under multiple user accounts ... even now ... I can GUARANTEE a system lock up. It is not if, but when. But it will happen as sure as the sun comes up in the morning. But what is happening to you, dedanna, is extreme. But if is happening on your M3B4 system, I don't have a clue because the ONLY problem I've had on my M3B4 is akonadi. - George

[mspiegel]

I just had another freeze a few minutes ago. It's not the battery monitor after all. Now I have no idea what is causing this problem. Anyone have any other ideas of settings I should change?

Which graphics card driver do you use? In my case the nouveau driver caused random freezes of the desktop. I had to switch to the proprietary nvidia driver.

[dedanna1029]

Agh! *smacking myself in the head* I totally spaced that M3 was running KDE 4.10 and M2 was not. I see the possible connection now.

Aye, it's something that's obviously been going on for a while now. I do not believe it to be Mageia-specific, I believe it to be KDE plasma-desktop specific. I've had it happen on other distros, too, before I settled with Mageia.

@ghmitch, VoodooDali is beginning to "get it". It's not *just* on the Lenovo system. It is on systems, each being very different ones, each the issue is solely with KDE, and each time it's plasma-desktop the highest on the list, from root terminal. Here is the kicker though, don't say you don't run any plasmoids (I don't specifically). You may be surprised what you find running. Unfortunately, without plasma-desktop, you have no KDE desktop at all.

On the netbook, I have 1GB RAM, neither nepomuk nor akonadi are enabled on it, Firefox I agree on, but believe to be a separate issue (and if you look at the code on it over the span of those years, you definitely will see the memory leaks, and insecurities that are brought on by them).

I don't use it because of it. I use Iron Browser.

[dedanna1029]

The problem is going to be selling the issue to the KDE devs on their bugzilla, if it's not filed already. There is no way to get to a proper tty even when frozen like that as said above, so no way to run a gdb backtrace or anything. You can't tell for sure what's going on in a root-only terminal that will run. The only way out of it is either "reboot" from root terminal, or Alt+SysRq+RSEIUB.

In none of those cases, will one get proper feedback for the bug... Ugh.

The KDE devs get quite picky with the info they want, and even when provided, try the arrogant denial routine for a while as it is. I don't know what to think.

[dedanna1029]

@mspiegel (sorry to flood here, honestly), go back and look at the OP of this thread a bit more closely, and then watch the progression from there from others. This is definitely not graphic-card related, and I thought I already saw z working on graphic-card related things here? Can't remember for sure, without going back to the previous page of this thread.

[mspiegel]

@mspiegel (sorry to flood here, honestly), go back and look at the OP of this thread a bit more closely, and then watch the progression from there from others. This is definitely not graphic-card related, and I thought I already saw z working on graphic-card related things here? Can't remember for sure, without going back to the previous page of this thread.

As far as I can see, the original poster did not tell which graphics card drivers he or she uses. And in my case the KDE desktop randomly froze as long as I used the nouveau driver in Mageia 2 or Fedora. A freezing desktop can have a lot of reasons including the graphics driver and your problem might be different to that one of the OP. I simply made a suggestion to z's question: "Anyone have any other ideas of settings I should change?" Nothing more.

[ghmitch]

don't say you don't run any plasmoids (I don't specifically).

I should have worded it: I don't use any plasmoids OTHER THAN those required by the basic KDE desktop. And the KDE desktop runs all kinds of exotic things that I certainly will never use in my lifetime with no easy way to shut them off.

THE REALLY GOOD NEWS IS that KDE is ACTUALLY working with a third party right now to produce a NEW "FLAVOR" of KDE to be known as "KDE LIGHT". It will look very much like KDE WITHOUT a lot of the cutting edge baggage and will be designed to be much more MODULAR than the full KDE product. Meaning the user can select and deselect components as they choose. I plan to be one of the first to give that a test drive when it comes out the door. Hopefully Mageia will pick it up.

[dedanna1029]

@mspiegel, but there were so many others with the same issue from there. They surely couldn't have all had the same graphics driver. Here, we have three different ones. The desktop server is on nvidia proprietary.

@ghmitch, right on! I'd seriously tear my whole system to shreds to be able to test that! KDE light! It's been needing to be light for how long now (since KDE4 started)? I would kiss whomever I needed to repeatedly, to see that Mageia picks it up!

Edit: @ennael, your users are calling you!

[Trikki]

I myself am also no stranger to system freezes. I have seen them in all shapes and forms, on two difrent desktop computers and one laptop. I have looked at all kinds of log files, untill my eyes hurt, and found nothing usefull. I have searched from all kinds of linux forums and asked mr. Google and have only found out that there are a million of things that could cause such a thing to happen. Just to name a few: failing powersource, cpu "overload", broken ram chips, connected usb devices malfunctioning in some way, too much network traffic (with open firewall), X server bugs, Kde desktop effects and so on. So it is really hard to find out what excacly is causing it.

I have found out that KDE seems to work more stable with the Akkonadi and Desktop effects turned off, but your mileage may vary...

My advice would be to try to restart X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace. This has saved me many times. If it does not work the first time try it a couple of times more, hold down the keys for awhile and so on.

Here is my list of things to do when such thing occurs:

1. Try to log in to virtual terminal with Ctrl+Alt+Fn and use top to see if there is some obvious reason, that is: some process that is using way too much cpu that you can kill
2. If virtual terminal login does not work, or top does not show any obvious reason try to restart X with Ctrl+Alt+Backspace
3. If this does not work either try Ctrl+Alt+Del witch in most Linux distros means "Restart computer". (Also if you can log to a virtua terminal you can restart the machine from there)
4. After this its time for the "skinny elephants": hold down Alt+Prt Sc( same as SysRq key) and press r+s+e+i+u+b (how to remember these? Raising Skinny Elephants Is Utterly Boring) (This is the same thing as the already mentioned "REISUB"). All of these keys send a command to the system -> see for example http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magic_SysRq_key.

There are actually more magic keys that I have heard of, but none I have tried seem to be of no use besides the above...

[z]

Which graphics card driver do you use? In my case the nouveau driver caused random freezes of the desktop. I had to switch to the proprietary nvidia driver.

I have one of those unsupported Nvidia Optimus cards. However, I am only using the intel graphics chip with Mageia. I don't think it's the graphics card that is the problem as the freezes only began occurring back in November. I installed Mageia 2 when it came out and everything was working fine initially. I'm beginning to suspect it might be firefox, although I don't recall always having it open when the freezes occured, but I do have it open often. I usually only work with a couple text editors, IDL, and firefox, and firefox is the only thing I can think of that I use frequently which was updated (and therefore possibly causing problems?). I've also noticed that firefox uses more ram than any other application, including plasma-desktop and IDL (at least for the moment). As of this posting, firefox is currently using just over 220MB of ram. Seems a bit high for a web browser. Opening up the same tabs and pages in chromium uses less than half that much ram. Actually, since I am watching my system monitor at the same time I am typing this, I'm noticing that as I type, the memory usage of firefox just keeps climbing, which is strange because the only thing I'm doing right now is typing and I'm pretty sure that the text of this post does not contain 30MB of information. However, memory usage itself shouldn't be a problem as I have not gotten nowhere near using all the ram available on my machine, but maybe firefox has memory allocation problems which are leading to crashes. I can't think of any reason why it should be such a memory hog. I think I'll try only using chomium for a while and see if that solves the problem. Although, it is fairly infrequent and I can go for weeks without a problem, as evidenced by my posts.

[doktor5000]

@ghmitch, right on! I'd seriously tear my whole system to shreds to be able to test that! KDE light! It's been needing to be light for how long now (since KDE4 started)? I would kiss whomever I needed to repeatedly, to see that Mageia picks it up!

It's not developped by some 3rd party, and current working title is KLyDE or Lightweight KDE. KDE Light is something different, merely a hack some distros distributed.
You may want to read https://blogs.kde.org/2013/04/11/hackwe ... ct-updated

Apart from that, please no more flaming. I'm using KDE too, and it can be configured for a rather minimal footprint. No Nepomuk, Akonadi, Strigi, PIM, activities, desktop effects or other such stuff.

If there is some issue that is hardly reproducable, and only occurs for really few people (the two issues in this thread might even be different problems, with totally different root cause) than the chances that it will be reproducable by developers are really low. Also KDE will probably not receive any major upgrades on Mageia 2, that's just too much work for the overloaded packagers and QA team.

If you encounter such an issue, you should first identify configuration differences from a default installation.
That is, even things you might forget, like /home shared over NFS, symlinks to your user configurations or other such low-level stuff.

[ghmitch]

Doktor is correct, the one I was referring to is KlyDE. It was something I vaguely remembered reading about and I forgot some of the details.

Two things I recommend for anyone having freezes: 1) Turn off Strigi indexing. (System Settings -> Workspace Appearance and Behavior -> Desktop Search) From what I am hearing, Strigi is in the process of being replaced by indexing that will be internal to Nepomuk and will FINALLY be sensitive to user activity. When user activity is sensed, Nepomuk will immediatly pause indexing activity until the system is again idle. Strigi is notoriously oblivious to user activity. Until this upgrade is fully completed, I recommend keeping Strigi disabled. 2) Make SURE that Akonadi is using "SQLite", NOT MariaDB. You may have to open the config tab on Akonadi tray to change this. KDE is currently in the process of migrating Akonadi from using a full blown SQL database to using SQLite which requires a lot less in terms of system resources. But you can do this NOW by simply chaning the options in the Akonadi Server setup. These two changes will reduce load on your system and probably make freezes that are caused by resource exhaution less likely.

[doktor5000]

Just two more additions:

- for further tips to speed up KDE, have a look at https://wiki.mageia.org/en/Speeding_up_KDE
- for Akonadi and sqlite, this is not recommended: http://techbase.kde.org/Projects/PIM/Ak ... _sqlite.3F
It may work and help, just keep in mind that in general it's not a good idea, according to userbase.

[ghmitch]

SQLite does work for users who DON'T USE AKONADI. All the problems with SQLite are related to usage. A lot of us have no use for Akonadi. Its just there because its there. The only time is does anything is when its doing mischief and that is when you want it connected to SQLite, not Maria DB. That is my logic. In the mean time, KDE, very much aware of the damage it can inflict when it goes sour connected to Maria DB, has been trying to make it work with SQLite. So if we are not using it, there is no downside to strapping it down to SQLite. - George

[dedanna1029]

Akonadi's disabled here, so is Strigi. Nepomuk is also, the works. Symlinks? NFS shares? doktor, you were there when I found that NFS shares were crashing Nautilus for me, therefore I don't have any, any more.
Samba, yes, but the system seems to handle them fine. Come to think of it, *I think* it was doing this even when I didn't have them hooked up yet.

I wasn't trying to flame or anything; I am just saying I think that KlyDe would be a really good idea to pick up.

I came in here to give info; that's what I did. Again, I'm seriously considering filing a bug. There is no reason for this. Other than that, I came here to do what I was going to, and am out now.

[doktor5000]

Symlinks? NFS shares? doktor, you were there when I found that NFS shares were crashing Nautilus for me, therefore I don't have any, any more.
Samba, yes, but the system seems to handle them fine. Come to think of it, *I think* it was doing this even when I didn't have them hooked up yet.

Sorry, but i cannot remember every users special setups or all previous problems in detail :/
Also my comments were not meant as offense - if you want to open a bugreport, find some procedure to reproduce it, and there you go.
No hard feelings here, hope it's the same for both of you

[ghmitch]

dedanna, Have you done anything like an `rpm -Va` to check your packages for corruptions or missing libraries or anything like that? I have had plenty of issues with KDE, but yours seem a bit extraordinary. I am really suspecting there is something seriously wrong going on. Another issue that needs to be looked into package wise IF either of the systems giving you problems are the result of upgrades is to go through the installed packages and look for any packages that may not have gotten removed in the upgrade that should have gotten removed. There are some situations where the package manager WILL allow the installation of conflicting packages that can cause a real nosebleed and plenty of confusion. There are SO many things that can cause a desktop to freeze. You can have two systems with seemingly an identical problem and the cause with each system can be completely different. Thus far you have looked at all the obvious things, now it is getting time to look at those things that might be less obvious. Unfortunately, hardware can also be involved. Since KDE tends to do stuff with hardware more than many other desktops, it probably could affect KDE and not the others. Sorry you are going through all of this pain. I know Docktor and all the other devs have worked really hard to make this distro the best out there, but there are always things that can go wrong with so much diversity of hardware and software around. - George

[dedanna1029]

Again, this is on three different systems with three different setups all with different hardware, and it is always plasma-desktop that's freezing on each system. None of the systems have been upgraded, and this would happen even after fresh installs.

So, how likely is there "some corruption"? I've stated this several times.

I have nothing more to add... please look at what I wrote above again. Thanks.

[doktor5000]

I don't see much common factors here, except for KDE.
What about graphics drivers, which are being used with which chip? Also, are desktop effects enabled or not?

To give a contrary example, on many different machines, with different graphics drivers, desktop effects enabled/not enabled,
plasma-desktop never froze for me. In earlier KDE4 days it may have crashed, but recovered directly thereafter.

[dedanna1029]

Happens both ways, doktor. Thanks. Netbook (Intel graphics accelerator), Lenovo laptop (I'm thinking the same with Intel? Not sure? I'm not in Scotland any more), old desktop server with nvidia.

It doesn't happen like, every time we're in KDE. As I said, it's random. Nothing more to add, honestly. I think I've been pretty explicit.

Edit:

I don't see much common factors here, except for KDE.

Now you're getting it. I did mention I was thinking of filing the bug with KDE. I'm just trying to figure out how to make one that's coherent that would also get them to actually want to look at it without the denial trip (which I've seen a lot of there); something else I mentioned earlier. I do honestly think it's plasma-desktop doing this. I'm thinking there would be more takers on that than we think.