Intermittent freezes in KDE desktop

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1

Hi - I recently upgraded from SuSE10.1 to SuSE10.3 and am now experiencing intermittent freezes/lockups with the KDE 3.5.7 “release 72.9” desktop and kicker. Immediately after booting up, I will get a freeze that lasts several minutes and watching the boot up messages my best guess is that kdm is where this initial freeze takes place.

After a few minutes the desktop will finally come alive insofar as I can usually interact with any open Konsoles for a few minutes before another freeze takes place. Doing things like clicking on the SuSE main menu button in the kicker bar will also immediately cause a freeze. After a few hours the system does become more responsive and the freezes occur less often but still do take place.

I have looked at both top and vmstat and do not see any unusual swap activity taking place. I have stopped all runlevel services including xinetd that I could safely do without killing X or the XDM service with no effect on this problem. I also attempted to shut down all the KDE services, but one of them - KDED Media Manager would not allow me to turn it off and if I attempted to do so it immediately would lock up the desktop and freeze on me for quite a long time, upwards of 10 minutes… Unchecking all these services and rebooting did not help and I would find that the KDED Media Manager would be running regardless, so something about the KDE Services model does not seem to be working right either…

I am not a linux guru, but some related threads/comments found here and elsewhere on the internet suggest I look at my .xsession-errors file which is pretty much unintelligible to me but looks like it might be trying to tell me something is wrong… Lets see… I don’t see how to attach a file to this posting so I will simply cut and paste it here, maybe someone can decipher it for me… sorry for the length of this…

Sure appreciate any help offered, this is pretty annoying and slows me down a lot…

Marc… (my .xsession-errors file follows…)

marc@BigBang:~> cat .xsession-errors
/etc/X11/xim: Checking whether an input method should be started.
/etc/X11/xim: user environment variable LANG=en_US.UTF-8
sourcing /etc/sysconfig/language to get the value of INPUT_METHOD
INPUT_METHOD is not set or empty (no user selected input method).
Trying to start a default input method for the locale en_US.UTF-8 …
There is no default input method for the current locale.
startkde: Starting up…
kbuildsycoca running…
KMenuBase::setProperty( “frameShadow”, value ) failed: property invalid, read-only or does not exist
KMenuBase::setProperty( “frameShape”, value ) failed: property invalid, read-only or does not exist
QObject::connect: No such signal Kicker::settingsChanged(SettingsCategory)
QObject::connect: (sender name: ‘kicker’)
QObject::connect: (receiver name: ‘animtt’)
sh: jackd: command not found
akode: Guessed format: xiph
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
KNotify::playTimeout
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x1400008
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 20
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x1400008
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 19
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x1400008
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 19
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x14000e4
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 19
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x3800054
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 19
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x3800054
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 19
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x3a00054
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
Major opcode: 19
Minor opcode: 0
Resource id: 0x3a00054

2

can you describe “freeze” a bit more? you can’t use the desktop anymore, but you can switch to console and desktop (ctrl+alt+f1/f7)?

do you have a ksysguard applet in your kicker? try removing that one.

3

disable beagle, i think that will fix your problem…

and, once you have done that you can add back all those services you
shut down…

if not, post again…and i’ll answer with something like:
http://tinyurl.com/6oo8cg

–
DenverD (Linux Counter 282315)
A Texan in Denmark

4

Thanks DenverD and Dirkmueller for your replies, good questions, some of which I should have supplied answers to…

I may have found a piece of the problem (not totally sure yet, time will tell) but your questions provoked me to take a hard look at what applets are running in the kicker and I found one called kpowersave. I have disabled it and that seems to have improved things a bit. I have been suspicious that swapping might be the cause of these freezes but neither top nor vmstat was indicating any. With the kpowersave applet disabled I now am seeing SOMETIMES a significant amount of swapping going on during some of, but NOT most of these freezes, reported by both top and vmstat. It does not make sense to me why kpowersave would mask my ability to see the swapping activities. BTW I have 2gb of memory and 50gb of swap space on the disk.

I am still getting an extraordinarily long delay towards the last phases of the system boot up process just about when X is becoming active and bringing up the KDE desktop. Though slow to start, the desktop will eventually show BUT still remains quite slow/forzen/sluggish for several minutes. Looking at the console (when I can get to it) at this point shows it hung on the kdm process but I don’t know how much value that is, it seems to me that these messages are somewhat asynchronous to what is actually happening in the system.

As for Beagle and Kerry, yes I have disabled/removed them from my system, I came across that suggestion early on in my internet searching…

Knowing that the services were not at fault I have added them back, but I will do more testing to see which of them are causing a lot of swapping. (I strongly suspect it is one of the Java based ones - Tomcat55, Apache, or James an email server also from Jakarta) I have disabled these during the boot up but that has no effect on the significant delay I am experiencing upon startup.

DenverD - I looked at the website you pointed to and cannot say it helps much. My installation media is fine, I checked both the md5sum and the media as suggested before I installed 10.3. I don’t think I have much of KDE4 installed (though it is hard to tell sometimes from the Yast descriptions) I do use Firefox and Thunderbird but neither of these were active when I get this freeze. I do use reiserFS partitions, is this really a potential problem? Don’t use Compiz or any Windoz “candy”, or Yahoo mail. I checked my memory and it is fine.

Dirk - your description is correct, I cannot use the desktop/KDE GUI when these freezes happen, or more accurately everything is very slow to respond. I can switch to the console but with a significant delay also however, just like everything else. And the responsiveness in the console is also frozen/slow/sluggish until whatever it is that is freezing my system finally unlocks…

I am not using ksysguard.

Still stumped… Marc…

5

Nope, I use reiserfs…no problems. (It was bogus info…just beagle’s interaction
with reiserfs, not reiserfs itself.)

I just found/fixed a problem with nvidia driver (they have a new version
released just today). So, if you have nvidia, do a quick test this way:

From run-level 3 (type a ‘3’ before you boot), un-do nvidia by doing:
sax2 -r -m 0=vesa
which installs the ‘vesa’ driver. See if that makes a difference.
To put back your nvidia, go back into run-level 3, and do:
sax2 -r -m 0=nvidia

Hope this guess helps…

Dave

6

Thanks Dave for your guess… No I am not using nVidia card, am using an ATI Radeon x1600 card…

Marc…