Have 32GB RAM and a rather beefy system - RAM, HDD space, processing power, graphics card power are all in abundance. I am using no proprietary drivers.
The best way to describe this problem is to show a picture - it’s weird, so in the image below:
The very left window is dolphin (KDE file manager) just opened up.
Next to it is the KDE system monitor
Below the system monitor is the KDE terminal
The two on the right are the Gnome system monitor and gnome terminal.
As you can see the two gnome apps are just fine while the KDE apps clearly have a problem. These I just opened up. However a KDE terminal that was open before my windows start going weird will be just fine.
Another thing to note is that this doesn’t happen until my system has been running for a while – everything seems fine from when I just log in anywhere from 10 minutes to a few hours and then it goes weird like this. Also, it never used to happen… some update did this in the last couple of weeks and I have no idea which one.
Any ideas? My first guess is a memory leak and some graphics memory is getting completely used up in some windowing system that affects KDE apps but not other apps. It also doesn’t seem to affect bigger applications like Evolution, FireFox, NetBeans. That is, it seems to be limited to KDE utilities but of course I haven’t tried to open everything up to see what is and is not affected so it could seem that way just because I haven’t tried enough things to see more.
I think this app. bittorrent-sync might be the culprit, at least I have gone almost a day with the issue from not running it. I’ll wait another day just be sure.
Does anyone know how to check on all resources a particular app might be using up? If I find things are still good tomorrow I would like to start it but monitor everything it’s using. It runs from a bash terminal.
It also continuously throws out warning messages which is what made me suspect it and turn it off. I then tried running it while redirecting all messages to /dev/null just in case it was a matter of too many using up all the display memory but that made no difference. Not running it at all however, so far, is making a difference.
It’s not the app. I thought it was because even not using it I have the same problem. Just seemingly takes a little longer before it happens when not running it.
The video card not a problem from a hardware point however I monitor all temp sensors and now that you mention it the one for my video card is reading 0 degrees which shows temp. software connector to the video card sensor it’s not working at all. However, my display has done that thing so we’ll see if rebooting fixes up the sensor issue.
The other temp. sensors are displaying just fine.
I would do a keyword search on this but I don’t even know what to search for… weird screen thingy I don’t think is going get me very far.
So logging out and back in (no need to reboot) fixes the display issue but even rebooting doesn’t fix my sensor issue. I tell my system to keep all versions of software in repos it downloads so I might be able to roll back that sensor software to a version that’s not broken.
False alarm with the temp app. I guess an update caused it to be a little funky. I had relabelled one of the sensors from temp1 to HD5870 after the graphics card and it didn’t like the relabelling anymore until I reapplied it.
Does anyone one know what technology these things that are messing up are built with?
I don’t think this is an xorg thing because most things keep working and a serious xorg problem I would expect to affect any thing graphic whereas this seems to be specific programs.
I noticed today that it also messes up Yast (the graphic version).
I was thinking maybe these things are running something common like QT or glib (I’m not sure if these are two of the same thing, this is uncharted waters for me). If I can find a common thread then maybe I can find a bug report and have some sort of a fix or at least know what to roll back to a previous version.
It maybe that the problem I am having on this thread is related. Not sure but Saw one thing happen that suggested there might be a relationship. You can see my reasoning in post 274 (I don’t want to duplicate text in different threads).
I have the same problem on my office pc that is running opensuse 13.1 as well. The problem started after I have updated some packages.
This is problem makes KDE almost unusable.
I had exactly the same problem: KDE apps (Dolphin, Kwrite, Kcalc, KsysGuard, Kickoff, YaST) getting windows corrupted, like text garbled and/or images overlapping. This happen between 10 and 60 minutes after boot. Applications work well just after any restart. It didn’t matter if computer got to sleep, hibernation or not. Applications like Firefox, Chrome, LibreOffice, BitTorrent were not affected at any time.
I tried several combinations of upgrading, downgrading and updating video drivers. None of these worked.
So, I applied this workaround provided by Reg_gie:
and now I have two days without problem. Just wondering what MITSHM is.
My sytem: HP Envy 15 / 8 GiB / openSUSE 13.1 (Bottle) (x86_64) / Linux 3.11.10-29-desktop / KDE 4.11.5
Glad to be of help! It took me close to 2 months to track this down. It is definitely fixed on my system too as I would have never been able to go 4 days without a problem before the fix.
All those apps use QT. A lot, if not most KDE apps run on QT. For the purpose of speed KDE tells QT to use a feature in Xorg to share memory instead of transferring images etc. through something normal for inter-app communication like a UNIX pipe. The command QT_X11_NO_MITSHM=1 tells QT (or KDE or Qt through KDE, not really sure of the exact path) to NOT use the Xorg shared memory and presumably it defaults back to some standard UNIX mechanism.
So the transfer of larger images might come across as slower but at least the problem is gone. So far on my system I haven’t been able to detect any slowdown however I don’t run games or watch much video which is probably where you would see the degradation in speed.
I also noticed that in OpenSuSE 13.2 all the apps use an old version of QT which is no longer supported by the QT developers and I didn’t see a way to upgrade their usage to the next major version of QT so it’s dead in the water for that avenue of support and it may be that the problem is resolved in the following QT versions.
You are more than welcome, it was a really annoying bug. The only downside I’ve experienced so far is that sometimes my display “hangs” for a while while (presumably) Xorg does something heavy in the background but all except once it comes back after waiting about a minute. Once did my display actually lock up which never happened before the setting change and even the hanging part is pretty rare, certainly not much of a bother.
Let me know your experiences too if you notice anything different!
Looks to me that you have a shared video memory issue.
Has been around as long as videocards use shared memory instead of dedicated VRAM.
I’d recommend you shift resources to your ktorrent app if you’re making many, many ( more than a hundred? but YMMV) network connections.
I describe how to to increase your networking resources and modify your Collision Control Algorithm in a paper I wrote long ago for an earlier version of openSUSE but should still be entirely relevant today for all current openSUSE versions.
Basic idea is that like all other Linux distros, by default openSUSE ships with defaults that support limited hardware but today a typical PC will typically have many gigabytes of RAM installed and fast processors. To enable use of these resources, you have to shift from a “minimal resources” configuration to a “medium server” configuration, particularly if you’re doing “server” type loads like torrents.
Re-size your numbers to however much RAM is installed in your machine and whatever other non-networking loads you may be running. The numbers in my article are based on 4GB RAM.