KDE 4.6 Random Freeze [Solved]

[gabvil]

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.

Same here, don't know what caused this issue, but KDE lately for my represent nothing but problems. I've switched to Xfce, and fallback Desktop Enviroment is Gnome.

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(...)

(...)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(...)

(...)I stress that I always run all the Sabayon updates whever they arrive and my system is up to date.

Same here, but i've the same problem related first with KDE and right now with Xfce.

I don't know where is the real problem and this issue is NOT total culprit of KDE. (i think)

[genfool]

Just to add to the thread, I have not been pleased with 4.6.2 ...
I have 4 systems with 2 gentoo and 2 sabayon, all kde.
I am currently on gentoo amd64 trying to fix a strange kde freeze error, I want to resize a window, move the cursor to the edge, the pointer turns into the two little arrows < > left click the mouse to drag it, b00m! the screen is locked up.
music player is still working as is internet... mouse cursor will move but cant click on anything, keyboard does not work.
Only cure is to ssh in and shut it down or a hard reboot.
This only happens when on twinview, but all 4 systems are on the same testing computer. q6700, nvidia 8400, 4gigs and two 500 gig drives. should be no hardware issue.

On a couple I had to mv ~/.kde4 and worked ok, one worked for a bit ... ended up having to re-install kde-meta in the end.
For me it is either mv or re-install kde-meta and they are all working pretty good now.

I updated this gentoo system yesterday and were about 20 updates for kde, another update today, and about 30 for kde.
So maybe the updates yesterday helped, as I am in twinview and can now re-size windows with out it crashing, but have no panel for menu options.
Maybe when the latest 30 updates finish and reboot, may be even better.

You all want to see a scary log, look at /var/log/kdm.log claims all kinds of weird stuff here, no dbus found and klauncher is exiting etc... yet dbus is started and running.... lets hope the updates save us.

[NotExcessive]

*bump*

Still no closer to solving this.

[raman]

There is no problem with KDE I think, mmm not completely. I was writing earlier, it's something very hard indexing disc.
My computer is freeze sometimes about 30 minut to 1 hour. Later is going normally. It's happening very, very rare.
Can you tell that your hard disc is working like crazy too??
If yes, I recommend to allow system to do his work, leave computer for night or something. Maybe you could see what precess is so busy.
For time, when I allow to finish his job, KDE is not freezing. Almost 1 month ago.

[NotExcessive]

No, there's no activity at all - hard drive, "top" shows nothing either. I can't track this down to any pattern of usage, application, or operating hours. All I know is that the system works perfectly fine with Gnome, and constantly does these intermittent lockups with KDE. Compiz on or Compiz off, results are the same.

[Richlion]

If yes, I recommend to allow system to do his work, leave computer for night or something. Maybe you could see what precess is so busy.

When this happened today I had a Terminal window with "top" running, but since I cannot access the system in any way I cannot see what's in that terminal if it's not on top of my other application windows. The only way to get my system working is to make a hard reboot with the power button.

I very often leave my computer switched on all the time during weekends including nights. Sorry, but this has never been happening until some recent updates. I can understand some indexing has to be done, but this process cannot take up all 4 cores of a processor to a point when the system is completely blocked, absolutely no reaction to mouse or keyboard.
This morning I rebooted my PC twice just after about 30 minutes of doing NOTHING - only Skype and Kopete switched on.
Although I also had Audacious switched on with a radio stream, I will start turning it off when not in use to see if this helps.

This cannot go on like this, because I was making backups of my folders on DVD's - one went fine, the second DVD was backed up and then again - BANG, the system went wild when the verification started. I had to reboot again. When something like this happens you can expect a DVD become corrupt. When you have USB drives connected you may even lose files when copying.

It's not the first time KDE introduces changes that can screw up a system. I think if we are sure this is KDE, then maybe we should complain on their forum.

[Fitzcarraldo]

I think if we are sure this is KDE, then maybe we should complain on their forum.

I think that's probably your best course of action, because not everyone is experiencing the problem. It would help if you provide them with as many details of your hardware and software as you can; the log files produced by sabayonlive-tools would be good to include (see Howto Gather Log Files Easily - Help Us to Help You).

Apart from the one-off problem I had with KMix (mentioned in an earlier post, and which is solved) I'm not experiencing any freezes at all with KDE 4.6.2 on the two machines I have with KDE installed. One is a nettop with Atom 330 CPU, NVIDIA ION GPU (nvidia-drivers-260.19.29) and the 64-bit 2.6.38-r1 kernel; the other is my main laptop with Core i7 CPU, ATI Mobility Radeon HD 5650 GPU (ati-drivers-11.2) and the 64-bit 2.6.37 kernel. So it's difficult to find a common factor.

[Richlion]

Just a short update, I had a similar problem using my old laptop when streaming a radio station with Audacious. After about 1-2 hours of streaming Audacious started choking. Now that I keep it switched off when not needed, the system seems to be stable. Maybe this is some kind of a problem with Audacious or the streaming. This is also probably why not everyone is experiencing the same problem. I'll create post on KDE forum.

[NotExcessive]

Finally solved it - two things: IP plasmoid and the pager.

1. The IP address display plasmoid (http://opendesktop.org/content/show.php?content=118534) was causing the system to bork. I removed it and replaced it with the other one ("IP address with flag") which works perfectly. The reason I didn't pick up on the IP address plasmoid from the beginning? It seemed to be working perfectly (displayed fine, no latency, or anything else to suggest something was amiss) and there were periods where I had no system problems for several days at a time, then bang, the desktop would freeze every couple of minutes and sometimes stay that way for over an hour on some occasions.

2. The pager - I'd always had trouble with it - would behave erratically - sometimes it would be fine, other times, it would totally corrupt the auto-hide panel at the top of screen, or cause all open windows to disappear instead of rotating the desktop cube, or suddenly display only 1 virtual desktop instead of the 4.

When it did go ga-ga, the only way to fix it was to add a 5th virtual desktop and then immediately remove it, or else under pager settings, set the number of desktops to 1, go OK, and then that would immediately restore normal operation again (4 virtual desktops). Sometimes nothing worked and reboot was needed. And even then...

It turns out that under pager settings, I can select Display Icons, or Display Text (number/name), BUT not both. It would display icons and text OK if I checked both options, that wasn't the problem. Problem was, if I did so then the pager displays what I want (great), but it falls over (not so great).

If I only select ONE of those options, it's fine, so now I've set Display Icons and Display Text (*) No Text.

So now I have a usable KDE laptop at last. No stalls, no corruption of any GUI stuff.