Random computer lock ups on KDE

dave_deu · Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 5:15 pm Post subject: Random computer lock ups on KDE

Hi, I'm running the latest stable KDE (4.4.5) and all of a sudden my computer seems to be locking up at random.

KDE seems to freeze although I can alt-tab between windows for a bit before it degrades and I can't do anything except move the mouse icon.

If I then do Ctrl-Alt-F1 to get a command prompt I find that I can enter my username, but then pressing enter makes the system hang on a blinking cursor without presenting the password prompt. There is then nothing that I can do except stare at the blinking cursor.

I thought it could be something to do with my hard drive going wrong but I don't have these problems when I dual boot into Windows XP. I've used smartctl to get some info on the hard drive but it seems fine. Memtest86 gives me fine results too.

Any idea?

Thanks,
Dave.

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

dave_deu · Posted: Sat Feb 26, 2011 8:36 pm Post subject:

Hi, should have mentioned I've cleaned all the dust off the CPU heat sink and also the dust off the graphics card but thanks for the suggestion.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

dave_deu · Posted: Mon Feb 28, 2011 10:55 pm Post subject:

I'm using a quite old Nvidia 5800 card. It's worked fine for the last 5 years. Maybe it _is_ on its way out? It doesn't feel hot though, and there was a time a couple of years ago when I did get crashes because it was bunged up with dust and it got really hot. (It doesn't get hot now)

Dave

baaann · Guru Joined: 23 Jan 2006 Posts: 558 Location: uk

Could it be the Strigi indexer kicking in and using up your available memory? I have seen this, under admittedly very heavy usage(3-4 concurrent users with openoffice/evolution/okular amongst others), on a sempron2600 with 1.5G ram and 1G swap

dave_deu · Posted: Wed Mar 02, 2011 11:38 pm Post subject:

Hi, I think that is a good suggestion.

How can I get Strigi to log somwhere to tell me it's started? My system log is so sparse of information that it's hard to tell what went wrong, and of course if I can't even type in a password so what are the changes of the error being logged to disk?

Dave

baaann · Guru Joined: 23 Jan 2006 Posts: 558 Location: uk

An icon appears in the system tray while it is indexing, I am not sure how you would obtain logs.
Unless you really need it I would try disabling it in

System Settings > Advanced > Desktop Search

and see how your system runs thereafter

FWIW it seems to run more efficiently and produce far better results under KDE-4.6, although that is on my desktop which doesn't have the same loading

dave_deu · Posted: Thu Mar 03, 2011 11:23 pm Post subject:

It turns out that Nepomuk is already disabled and in the memory section it's listed as limited to 50MB. My PC has been more stable in the last few days, but probably because it hasn't been left turned on for so long.

Thanks for the tip though.

Dave

psdasilva · Apprentice Joined: 03 Sep 2005 Posts: 239

I had the same problem yesterday! It occured after I issued a grep over a 2GB file. It used a lot of memory and almost froze my computer. KDE remained locked, except for ALT-TABS, after grep ended. Needed to ALT-BACKSPACE an login again.

Today the same problem occured to my wife on a different computer and she was only using firefox!!

The only thing I did recently was a normal update (emerge -DNu ...) on tuesday.

BTW, I don't have strigi working.

dave_deu · Posted: Fri Mar 04, 2011 8:40 pm Post subject:

Hmm, something is afoot. I am running a stable (not ~x86) KDE system too. I have never had a crash on Windows (I dual boot) despite using the system resources in a similar way.

I have Nvidia graphics so for the time being unless there are better suggestions, I'm putting the issue down to a dodgy graphics driver. I'll use my onboard graphics and see if that improves the situation.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

I did not think of any suggestions earlier, but now I have one. When this happens, ssh into your system remotely and get dmesg output and your Xorg server logs. Running nvidia-bug-report.sh to provide a bug report for nvidia that you can submit at nvnews.net would not be a bad idea.

dave_deu · Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 10:39 am Post subject:

Hmm, I dismissed this idea before due to the networking complexities but maybe I could use putty on my phone to ssh in over the local network. I'll give it a go.

Thanks,
Dave

dave_deu · Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 1:04 pm Post subject:

It locked up again with only alt-tab and alt-f1 working for a few keypresses. I sshed in and after entering my username it hung up. You can hear a brief disc access after the username is enter.

Exactly the same happens when I am logged in locally; you go to alt-f1 console, enter the username (any) and the PC hangs with a flashing cursor without putting up the password prompt.

Thereafter there is no hard disc access that I can hear.

My conclusion is that something in KDE is taking 100% of CPU with no disc access. Or maybe something to do with Firefox. I'm going to try running KDE without Amarok up too.

Dave

xdarma · Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 6:32 pm Post subject:

Similar problem on my system, the culprit was the hp-tray.
Rebuilding all involded things (like sip, PyQt4, pykde4, and hplip) seems ok.
python-updater too can be useful.

Hope this helps.
_________________
proud user of faKeDE-4.7.3 -> back to windowmaker -> moved to LXQt

dave_deu · Posted: Sat Mar 05, 2011 7:34 pm Post subject:

Thanks for the tip. I assume you are referring to a proprietary HP application that resides in the system tray? Sadly I don't have any of those.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

dave_deu · Posted: Sun Mar 06, 2011 7:17 pm Post subject:

Tried disabling compositing but it still locks up. :-(

Cheers anyway.

Dave

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110

wjb · Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 10:44 am Post subject:

Did you look at the X logs yet: /var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old

dave_deu · Posted: Mon Mar 07, 2011 2:01 pm Post subject:

Hi, thanks for the microcode tip however I run an AMD processor and as I understand it the microcode update would only improve the performance of the chip and is not designed to fix bugs.

I'll check the server logs tonight, however by chance yesterday I noticed that the PC crashed when Kmail was checking for new mail so I am running my PC without Kmail for a week.

Dave

baaann · Guru Joined: 23 Jan 2006 Posts: 558 Location: uk

It would be quite crude, but why not leave top running in konsole on your desktop? It would allow you to see the system status at lock up

Shining Arcanine · Veteran Joined: 24 Sep 2009 Posts: 1110