Xubuntu 8.10 intrepid ibex - Sony Vaio PCG-V505BX freezes within 30 minutes or so

[bert cash]

WIthin 20-30 minutes my system freezes almost totally except for the fact that the cursor may be moved a bit sporadically around by small distances. This makes me feel like being back to Windows 98 or NT....random system freezes aren't cool in the Linux universe! I installed Fluxbox and the problem happens again. Note that am on dual boot and Windows XP works OK (even if it's slow like hell) so it is not an hardware issue I suppose.

[wolfger (wolfger)]

Is there any action in common with the computer freezing? If you sit idle does the computer freeze as well?

When the system "freezes", can you get to a command line login with ctrl-alt-f2? If so, run the following:
top -n 1 > ~/top
dmesg > ~/dmesg
Then attach those files (top and dmesg, in your home directory) to this bug report.

[Mathja (ja-garciap0)]

Something similar, happens on my Dell XPS M1210 with Dual Boot Windows XP and Ubuntu 8.10. My system suddenlly freezes even the clock stops, but I can move my cursor in very very slow and not-smooth way. Keyboard does not respond. Ctrl+Alt+del or backspace doesn't work. But during all this process my 'thinking' LED (I dont know how to call it) is on. Its like if suddenlly an applications starts using 100% of CPU capability and everything slows down and freezez. Just like in windows 95...

This has happened to me about 5 times this week. And everytime I have been using different applications so I dont know if there is anything in common (besides the symptoms). I am no sure but I think that in this 5 times, I had a pdf viewer running (could have been evince or acroread, I use both). By the way in each of this five times I had to force reebot by using the power button.

I will try to run top a dmesg if this happend again, but really don't think that ctrl+alt+f2 will work.

Any other thing I could attach to give you more information?

[wolfger (wolfger)]

if you could run 'top' constantly in an open window (or in Conky, or some such), we might get to see which app is eating the CPU when it freezes. Would be nice to know if there was a specific circumstance, application, or combination of applications that causes this. Keep track of which apps are running when it freezes.

[Mathja (ja-garciap0)]

It has just happened again...
I had just read your post. I was reading about conky and it started when i was scrolling down the firefox window. I wasn't running top... but the applications that were running are: Thunderbird, OppenOffice, acroread (with very large file), and two firefox windows.

Don't know if it could be of any help, but I am also using compiz and thunderbird was initiated using alltray.

I will leave a top window open, and will read about conky later.

[Mathja (ja-garciap0)]

I forgot to say nautilus was running too.

[Simon (mailing-lists)]

That sound very much like the problems I have on a thinkpad R50p since I installed Intrepid.
The system is fully encrypted, hence I blamed cryptsetup until stumbling upon this report.
Nearly daily the system freezes due to high load, cpu and harddisk-activity go nuts. Killing X stops whatever process gone wild. (If I can still manage to kill X).
I was able to run top a few times when the incident occured but could not determine a specific application. In many cases one application or service (updatedb.mlocat and update-apt-xapi, sometimes some Java app with Sun's Java) was using up to 45/50% of the processor speed. Once the problem gets worse top freezes. The logs seem to contain no useful hints, either.
Is any of the above reporters using compiz, by the way?

[Mathja (ja-garciap0)]

yes. I was using compiz.

By the way I got really tired of this happening, therefore I made a re-install of intrepid (I have separated home partition so my preferences are still same) and the problem continues.

[John Bradley Bulsterbaum (infinitelink)]

I also get a slowing, crawling, system related to update-apt-xapi suddenly hogging system resources, though I don't know if that's the only thing (had some similar behavior with Konqueror suddenly eating a bunch of system too). Anyway, the full process name is update-apt-xapian-index (the monitor truncates). There something related, perhaps, here: http://<email address hidden>/msg1139249.html

I'm on KDE. I don't know what "Top" is. I'm running a Dell Inspiron 9100.

[ouiji (inanimatecode)]

After installing Ubuntu 9x Desktop on my Sony Vaio PCG-V505BX I ran into the same issue, after ctrl-alt-f2'ing to another login and running "Top", it showed that WPA_Supplicant was using 97.9% of the CPU. Simply turning off the built in wireless adapter resolved the issue. More or less proving the issue is with the wireless adapter and WPA_Supplicant. I will post again if and when I find a way to resolve the issue, or at least proivide the hardware information causing the conflict.

 - ouiji

(By the way, simply trying to kill the WPA_Supplicant process does not work as it is automatically re-started)

[penalvch (penalvch)]

bert cash, thank you for reporting this bug to Ubuntu. Intrepid reached EOL on April 30, 2010.
See this document for currently supported Ubuntu releases: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Releases

Is this an issue in a supported release? If so, could you please execute the following command, as it will automatically gather debugging information, in a terminal:
apport-collect 300966

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

[Expired for linux (Ubuntu) because there has been no activity for 60 days.]