KDE 4.6 Random Freeze [Solved]

[NotExcessive]

About a month or so ago, I put KDE 4.6 onto my Acer Aspire 5745G laptop. It had Sabayon 5.3 (64-bit), Compiz, and Gnome on it, and was rock stable. After I put KDE on, I had nothing but dramas - quite often, I couldn't launch an app, move a window, or use the pager - this was because KDE would freeze and not respond for a period of anywhere between 15 and 60 seconds. So I went back to using Gnome.

Well, yesterday I decided to bite the bullet, and wipe the machine and do a fresh install to see if I can get to the bottom of this. I put Sabayon 5.5 on, with KDE4.6 and Compiz. No other window managers.

After I had the machine up and running, the same problems appeared: my auto-hide panel at the top of the screen occasionally didn't show up until maybe a full minute after I pushed the mouse to the top screen edge; I'd click on the menu launcher and nothing would happen for half a minute; I'd click on a window to drag it across the desktop and nothing would move for 40 seconds... things like that.

Of course after the system unfroze, all of my frustrated actions would fly forth at warp speed because the system had buffered everything.

Quite by accident, on this new installation, I'd set the clock in the bottom panel to show the seconds display (the previous installation only showed minutes). That's when I noticed that the time display would frequently freeze (without my doing anything at all on the machine) for the same sorts of periods that had been plaguing me all along. Also, several times a minute, it would skip a couple of seconds (eg from showing 34 to showing 36), and also bunny-hop (eg hang on 18 for a second and a half, then jump to 19 for a fraction of a second before skipping straight to 20 etc.) and then I realised that it had nothing to do with user activity.

All my troubleshooting had been along the lines of seeing if Compiz was the culprit (loose binding, indirect rendering) but after switching Compiz off and having the problems persist under KDE alone, I was back at square one. I tried to find out what was triggering the freeze when I hit the auto-hide panel or moved a window or used the pager... I never twigged that the system was going to freeze no matter what I was doing (or not doing) because in the previous installation, I didn't have a seconds display on the clock to clue me in.

So the question is: what can be causing this? As I've said, you don't need to be doing anything on the machine. As a test, I noted that when the clock froze and I moved the mouse to the top screen edge to activate the auto-hide panel there, the panel didn't show. When the time display resumed, the panel shot out and acted normally.

The machine has an nvidia GPU, it has the latest nvidia drivers installed, and opengl is set correctly to nvidia. I've gone into KDE settings and disabled nepomuk and strigi. When the freeze happens, existing applications work normally (music plays in clementine perfectly fine and the web browser still surfs the net, although I note that as I'm typing this, I'm frequently prevented from typing text until the system unfreezes, whereupon all my keystrokes shoot out of the buffer and zoom across the text box). Compiz still works and I can rotate the cube with the mouse. I've got top running in yakuake and when the freeze happens all I see is X taking up 7% of the CPU, and memory never gets worse than 0.9%.

Can anyone help solve this? I love KDE but this is driving me nuts.

[NoSavy]

I don't know if this will help you but I suffered a similar problem with my 64bit desktop system and previously with the 32bit system.
The problem was intermittent "freezes" for about 1 -5 seconds then "catch up" as you've described. Mostly occurring after a resume from a "suspend to ram".
I have several other systems on this machine, all with KDE, and they all use the Nvidia graphics. I have spent up to 3 months trying to get to the bottom of this as it only Sabayon that suffers this problem. I have googled extensivly and tried so many methods, too numerous to list or remember. All have failed or have solved it and produced another side effect. It would not even cure it using an identical xorg file and the Nvidia settings set the same.
Well, Tuesday I was having another stab at it and in the Nvidia settings screen under OpenGL setting I disabled "Allow flipping". Problem now seems to be solved and I am not aware of any side effects yet.
The odd thing is Nvidia is set to "allow flipping" in all the other systems and no problems.
Give it try it may solve your problem.

NS.

Question to anyone. Is it possible to install the latest Nvidia driver from the Nvidia site into Sabayon.???

NS.

[NotExcessive]

Yeah tried that - no effect. Since then, I've tried page flipping on, power miser set to max performance, all desktop effects in KDE off.... nothing.

I'm wondering if it's a problem in the nvidia driver (though funnily enough there's no problem under Gnome). I've just downloaded the 260.19.44 driver - like you asked, any way of installing that natively inside Sabayon?

[NotExcessive]

Just wondering: I currently have x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-260.19.29#2.6.37-sabayon installed. What is the difference between this and x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-96.43.19#2.6.37-sabayon? Is there any possibility this is the cause of the random freezes?

[grimly64]

was on kernel 2.6.37 when this first started on a 64 bit PC.
Activate Desktop Cube, get out of Desktop Cube, Kwin window manager freezes, and turns off effects.
Had not done a fresh install since 2.6.33. Now have done a fresh install, and even upgraded to 2.6.38 and it still freezes when coming out of the Desktop Cube.
Have resorted to just turning off Desktop effects.

On a side note, noticed that "Activities" (Right Click on Desktop to see it) keeps building and building... can turn off ones not being used, but how do you delete them? Getting tired of, after a reboot, all the icons and wallpapers are gone. Not always but more often than not.

Nivida Geforce 9500 / 64 bit / KDE

[raman]

Dunno if this is related wirth KDE effects. I'm using compiz, because kwin is taking to much processor.
Sometimes my computer is working very hard, mouse is lagging, I can't switch windows or doing something. Hard disc is working very hard. For some time I try to see what is happening on this time. but system is lagging some much, so I couldn't catch what is wrong.
I susspect some hard disc indexing, files indexing or something like defragmentation or checking disc integrity?
Could you help me what I can check? This is new system and I don't have change to much, so I think more ppl have this lagging some time.

[raman]

I think it's virtuoso, nepomuk? I saw something like this on htop.

[Fitzcarraldo]

Just wondering: I currently have x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-260.19.29#2.6.37-sabayon installed. What is the difference between this and x11-drivers/nvidia-drivers-96.43.19#2.6.37-sabayon? Is there any possibility this is the cause of the random freezes?

You can check on the NVIDIA Web site whether you need to use the 260.19.xx series driver or the 96.43.xx series driver, depending on which NVIDIA GPU you have: Manually find drivers for my NVIDIA products.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I don't know if it's related to the problem some of you are experiencing, but some weeks ago I had a problem with KMix taking ages to respond: KMix not responding [Solved]. Have any of you tried regenerating all the KDE 4 configuration files? If you want to try that, open a Konsole window and enter the following command:

Code: Select all

mv ~/.kde4/ ~/.kde4.bak

(You could instead do rm -rf ~/.kde4 but I've suggested renaming the directory .kde4 to .kde4.bak so you can revert if you want.)

Then reboot. KDE will then re-generate the ~/.kde4 directory and all its contents. You'll have to: reconfigure the Panel to re-add the Plasma widgets that you had on the previous Panel; re-specify your wallpaper; etc.

Sometimes some of the KDE configuration files become corrupted somehow and the easiest thing to do is reset everything.

[Richlion]

Hello,

I just wanted to add, for the past 2-3 months I've been experiencing total system freezes on these two occasions:
1) I would plug in my USB external hard drive to make a copy of my data, when I start copying sets of data in 1 or 10 GB chunks at some point the whole system would start choking and after 1 minute it would completely freeze and only a hard reset would help.
2) I would watch a movie via VLC and half way through the movie (from a DVD or from disk) the same would happen - system starts choking

At the same time the only programs I would have running would be Audacious, a web browser, Skype and Kopete.

This is very irritating, because when the system freezes there is nothing you can do, like open a console and run some commands to try and figure out what process is running and crippling the system.

Since yesterday I was trying to backup my 500GB hard drive to a USB drive and I had to restart the system 10 times to start all over again.

Is it possible the Nepomuk service is causing a problem? I do the copying mainly via Dolphin. What log files could be checked? Yesterday when I had trouble mounting my NTFS hard drive I would run the option:
sabutil menu ->
07 - Pastebin fdisk -l
and that would also cause the system to grind to a halt.

I stress that I always run all the Sabayon updates whever they arrive and my system is up to date. I hardly suspect my hardware, because with previous SL versions and older KDE I didn't have there problems and my machine is a powerful AMD 64bit Quad core with 4GB of memory.

Regards,
Richard