Strange freezes in KDE

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1

Hello everyone,
I have some very strange locks/freezes in my KDE. This is happening for a lot of time now, but in the last few days it’s almost unbearable to use the desktop.
I run it with the latest updates of Leap 15.2 of course. What is happening, is that sounds works just fine, mouse pointer is moving around, I can switch back and forth to different VTs, but, I cannot change windows, I cannot type anything in them etc. Today this happen during a conference call. So, video was frozen, just like I took a snapshot. But, I could move the pointer, the sound was perfect etc etc etc.

My problem of course is that I cannot find a way to troubleshoot this. Known Logs are not showing anyting strange, so, I am in the dark.

My host is an Intel Pentium G3220/16GB RAM.

Any help/hint would be appreciated.

2

Are you using Intel’s builtin graphics?

3

@tpe:

  1. Enough disk free space for /tmp/ and /var/ ?
  2. Old content in ~/.cache/ ?
  3. Btrfs system partition and the Btrfs housekeeping not being executed frequently enough?
  4. Outdated KDE configuration files in ~/.config/ ? – The Leap 15.2 KDE Plasma seems to perform better with a new, fresh, configuration …
  5. Old user files cached in /tmp/ and/or /var/ ?
  6. Install “kdebugsettings” and “Turn Off All Messages” …
  7. Unneeded outdated files in ~/.kde4/ ?
  8. Clean up the systemd Journal files – you’ll need to manually delete the user journal files in the /var/log/journal/«a long hexadecimal string»/ directory …

Clean up the system Journal with “journalctl --vacuum-time=1weeks” – or whatever time span you need for the system Journal …
Check the system Journal for errors with “journalctl --verify” …

4

Yes, Intel only

5
  1. Enough disk free space for /tmp/ and /var/ ? Yes
  2. Old content in ~/.cache/ ? **I am sure it’s full of old stuff. Besides the Leap 15.2 is the result of some 3-4 system upgrades. **
  3. Btrfs system partition and the Btrfs housekeeping not being executed frequently enough? No, plain old ext4
  4. Outdated KDE configuration files in ~/.config/ ? – The Leap 15.2 KDE Plasma seems to perform better with a new, fresh, configuration … Maybe, but obviously if I have to reconfigure my whole environment, I might as well switch to Fedora.
  5. Old user files cached in /tmp/ and/or /var/ ? They are cleaned up regularly.
  6. Install “kdebugsettings” and “Turn Off All Messages” … Let’s see what this will result.
  7. Unneeded outdated files in ~/.kde4/ ? Almost empty directory. It has only files for Amarok and actually I emptied it. Let’s see.
  8. Clean up the systemd Journal files – you’ll need to manually delete the user journal files in the /var/log/journal/«a long hexadecimal string»/ directory … No permanent journal

Clean up the system Journal with “journalctl --vacuum-time=1weeks” – or whatever time span you need for the system Journal …
Check the system Journal for errors with “journalctl --verify” …

6

You can safely clean out ~/.cache/ from a VT when you’ve logged out from the KDE session.

With “l -t” you can find the configuration files which are several years old – they can usually be deleted and then at least those bits and pieces of KDE can be reconfigured as needed …

With Leap 15.2, KDE no longer logs the debug messages to the user’s session log file – ~/.local/share/sddm/xorg-session.log – they’re now logged to the user’s systemd journal file …