Docky Freezes with Update as of 2-9-2010

[Michael Merline]

I wasn't able to gather any terminal info, but Docky seems to freeze at random after installing updates on the 9th. System Monitor revealed a 0 process.

Ubuntu 9.10
Onboard Video
Current version of Gnome 2
don't know my Mono version.

[Stavros Korokithakis (stavrosk)]

Same here, docky freezes at random with no CPU load or anything. It will just take a second to activate when I press the Do hotkey or move my mouse over a program. It's rendered Do completely unusable when the purpose of the program is to respond *immediately* to my inputs.

[Michael Merline (merline)]

I should clarify: I'm running both Do and Docky, but Docky is the "Docky2" independent app.

Do seems to be working correctly. Docky will randomly freeze and be completely unresponsive.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

@Stavros: this bug report is about Docky 2, Docky 1 (which is part of Do) is not being maintained.

@Red: does it freeze on startup? Or does it work for awhile then freeze? There is a known bug that makes it freeze randomly on startup, for the devs this seems to happen < 20% of the time and is caused by enabling the weather and/or gmail plugins.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

If Docky freezes up, open a new terminal and find the pid for docky (ps aux|grep Docky.exe). Then run this command:

$ kill -SIGQUIT <pid>

Then find the *original terminal* that you started Docky from. It should now contain a stack trace. Give that output to us here.

Note that if you started Docky automatically on login or from the panel/etc, the output might be in ~/.xsession-errors

[Michael Merline (merline)]

@Robert I'm not running either the weather or gmail plugins. The freezing seems to occur sometime after start-up, often after I've used the computer/Docky for at least a few minutes (with standard usability).

If it freezes up again I will try to document the stack trace. I'm novice to some of the command-line elements of linux and any bug reporting, so I'll do my best going off limited knowledge.

[Michael Merline (merline)]

@Robert NOTE: I have Docky set to startup automatically. I do not execute Docky from the terminal, only from the panel or Gnome Do.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Ok, lets make it simple then. Start Docky however you normally do. When you notice it has frozen, open a terminal and run this:

kill -SIGQUIT $(ps x|grep Docky.exe|grep -v grep|awk '{ print $1; }')

Then attach your ~/.xsession-errors file to this bug report, which should contain the trace I want.

[Michael Merline (merline)]

You got it! Thanks for all the help. I'm trying to learn some of this stuff (or if anything just contribute to Linux and Ubuntu seeing as I use it so much) but it's hard to dive in headfirst. I appreciate you doing what you can.

I'll post as soon as I experience another freeze (before i posted it was happening every few minutes).

[augias (augias)]

Hiyo. The freezing has been occurring to me as well, but i wouldn't say unprovoked, as I've been getting in and out of gnome-shell and quitting nautilus for this and that reason. But many times it does happen pretty often unprovoked. Here's the thread dump. I hope this is related to the bug reporter's issue and helps :)

bzr revno 1148
ubuntu 9.10 w/ xserver-xorg 1:7.4 from repository
intel GM965/GL960

[augias (augias)]

It crashed again while writing the comment and recorded this dump as well. I'm uploading it because they are different except the last two "paragraphs" and I don't know any better. Sorry if that was pointless :B

[Michael Merline (merline)]

There we go. I attached an error report.

[Michael Merline (merline)]

I noticed there was an update this weekend. Should I attach a new report if Docky freezes up again (I did apply the update on two different computers, one 32 and one 64 bit 9.10)?

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

same problem here;

Docky 2.1.0
bzr docky r1160 ppa

running with compiz, I've switched off all plugins/docklets except clock, trash and network manager and it's still behaving the same, Do is not running at the same time.

from reading other peoples reports it appears it's dbus related, could it be a dbus update that has caused the problem?

[Michael Merline (merline)]

I haven't noticed any crashes since early last week on any of my computers running Docky. Perhaps the error was resolved with an update to either Docky or something else.

[Karl Lattimer (karl-qdh)]

It can't be fixed, as with the most recent from the PPA it still hangs, my system is fully up to date so not sure what is actually making it freeze, could be dbus, could be something else :/

[Michael Merline (merline)]

So where do we go from here? I'm still having daily freezes which kinda destroys usability.

Is there some report I can post or something to help fix this?

[jacobbrett (jacobbrett)]

Docky randomly freezes Ubuntu 9.10 x64 for me (for around ~20 seconds at a time), though not necessarily at start-up. Graphics card is NVIDIA GeForce GT 130M.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

@Jacob: thats probably the Nvidia bug, run with the --nvidia flag (or update to today's trunk which should auto-detect Nvidia cards and enable that flag for you).

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

@Michael: you should be running Docky with the '--debug' flag set, for more output. Also if it freezes, open a terminal and run:

kill -SIGQUIT $(ps x|grep Docky.exe|grep -v grep|awk '{ print $1; }')

Which should cause a thread dump to appear in Docky's terminal. If you auto-start Docky, that output most likely is in ~/.xsession-errors (please only give us the tail end of the file relevant to Docky, it is typically huge).

[Michael Merline (merline)]

I will try to do so if it happens again. I'm pretty new to the terminal and bug reporting in general. Either way, it's been some time since a freeze has occurred. An update along the way may have fixed things on my end.

[Robert Dyer (psybers)]

Ok based on the log reports I have already received, this appears to be a duplicate of another bug.