Dapper: Add/Remove applications and Update Manager make the system unresponsive

[seanh]

My laptop is an IBM Thinkpad T21 currently running the Dapper Beta. Hardware info: https://wiki.ubuntu.com/SeanHammond?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=taptaplshw.html

The Add/Remove Applications app brings the entire system to a halt. The app is very slow to launch and to complete searches, and when installing something (I tested it by installing some life simulator game) the app froze, freezing the entire OS along with it (that is, making the system unresponsive, it still appeared to be working in the background) and making the system unusable, for 45 minutes (no exaggeration) until finally I was able to kill GNOME via CTRL-ALT-BKSPCE.

On the same laptop in Breezy Add Applications did not have this problem.

Details:

The same problem was not found when using Synaptic Package Manager under the same circumstances on the same machine.

I could see the disk activity LED flashing constantly the entire time the system was unresponsive.

When I did the test the laptop wasn't connected to the Internet, so Add Applications could not have succeeded in installing the package I asked for. I just wanted to see what the error message was.

The current state of my root partition is:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda3 2.9G 2.1G 692M 76% /

so I wonder if the lack of free space was what caused the problem (although I was only asking it to install one small app that it couldn't have downloaded anyway).

I think I saw this same problem with the same system when downloading a big chunk (around 200Mb) of updates earlier using Update Manager - the system was completely frozen for a very long time although I could see there was disk activity. Eventually the update succeeded, but it took far longer than usual. On Breezy on the same machine a large update would not take nearly as long and although it would slow the system down a lot it wouldn't make it completely unresponsive.

[seanh (seanh)]

Just downloaded another chunk of Dapper updates on this laptop (70Mb this time) and can confirm that update-manager makes the system unresponsive for a long time while the updates are installed. I closed the laptop lid while it was updating, and when opening it I couldn't acitvate the screen again, ubuntu was completely unresponsive. Again the disk activity light was busy the whole time.

[Paul Sladen (sladen)]

From the dmidecode, this machine appears to have 256MB of RAM. I would if it had gone into a swap trashing. Could you provide the output of:

  $ cat /proc/swaps

Are you able to log into the machine using SSH (or using the console by pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1). You may then be able to run 'top' to find out what is using up all the resources.

If that's possible can you try attaching to the process with:

  strace -p $(pidof gnome-app-install)

and see if you can get a log of what it's doing.

Another indirect source of this behaviour I've seen is the Beagle search tool choosing to update its cache and quite happily chuggs away through the whole disk completely shutting out anything else.

Finally, if you need to recover the machine, the following sequence can be useful:

  Alt-SysRq-s Alt-SysRq-u Alt-SysRq-b (Sync, Unmount, reBoot).

[seanh (seanh)]

cat /proc/swaps gives no output, but I have restarted the laptop since doing the update.

When I did the test with Add/Remove Applications I was able to switch to another virtual console and login, but this happened extremely slowly. Next
time I made be able to try getting to the top command though.

On Wed, May 17, 2006 at 07:56:46PM -0000, Paul Sladen wrote:
> >From the dmidecode, this machine appears to have 256MB of RAM. I would
> if it had gone into a swap trashing. Could you provide the output of:
>
> $ cat /proc/swaps
>
> Are you able to log into the machine using SSH (or using the console by
> pressing Ctrl-Alt-F1). You may then be able to run 'top' to find out
> what is using up all the resources.
>
> If that's possible can you try attaching to the process with:
>
> strace -p $(pidof gnome-app-install)
>
> and see if you can get a log of what it's doing.
>
> Another indirect source of this behaviour I've seen is the Beagle search
> tool choosing to update its cache and quite happily chuggs away through
> the whole disk completely shutting out anything else.
>
> Finally, if you need to recover the machine, the following sequence can
> be useful:
>
> Alt-SysRq-s Alt-SysRq-u Alt-SysRq-b (Sync, Unmount, reBoot).
>
> --
> Dapper: Add/Remove applications and Update Manager make the system unresponsive
> https://launchpad.net/bugs/45250
>

--
<email address hidden>
SDF Public Access UNIX System - http://sdf.lonestar.org

[seanh (seanh)]

I got the behaviour again when updating dapper today, though only for a small portion of the update this time.

cat /proc/swaps

always seems to produce no output, and

strace -p $(pidof gnome-app-install)

just printed out help information for the strace command, looks like there's a mistake in the command. I also tried $(pidof gnome-app-install) and pidof gnome-app-install on their own in case there was some number you meant me to substitute into the command, but they produced no output. I ran ps and noted that, since I was logged in on a seperate virtual terminal, gnome-app-install was not running in my session. I also tried the commands from a gnome-terminal within the gnome session though, once the system was more responsive again but while the update was still running, and still got no results.

[Mantas Kriaučiūnas (mantas)]

chombee at 2006-05-19 wrote:
> I got the behaviour again when updating dapper today, though only for a small portion of the update this time.
>
> cat /proc/swaps
>
> always seems to produce no output

So, you have no swap and because of this you are running out of RAM (memory).
It seems this issue is duplicate of bug #44829

[Michael Vogt (mvo)]

Thanks for your bugreport.

gnome-app-install and update-manager got a lot better with regard of resource handling in feisty. This shouldn't be a issue anymore unless the ram is really limited.

Thanks,
 Michael