I use gnome shell in Fedora 18 x86_64 on an emachines E725 notebook. For the last month, every 60 seconds the display locks up for 25 seconds. Sometimes it does this for 10 minutes, and sometimes all day. The mouse cursor still moves, and sound still plays without skipping. Also, progress bars jump forward when it unfreezes as they never froze. I have stopped all cron tasks and restarted many times. The exact second the clock stops on varies each time I restart the system. I have also noticed a small increase in network use right before it freezes. It sometimes starts freezing before I open any apps, and it still freezes after I close all apps. Please let me know if there is any additional information I should post. I have done many convoluted google and stackoverflow searches over a long period of time and have found no similar problems posted. Thank you for any help or advice.
Probably off topic, but I'd suggest trying a CD/USB linux distribution (i.e. one that runs off the CD rather than having to install it).
If that has problems, you are probably looking at a hardware issue.
If a CD distribution works, then yep, it's something wrong with your installation.
Related
I have a new Win10 laptop. I've installed lots of software, including a 25-year-old Codewright editor that I've customized up the wazoo, and that I've been installing on all my machines for, well, 25 years. After working for a few days, it suddenly stopped, and reinstalling it didn't fix it. On startup, it puts up a small splash window, and normally opens the main window a half a second later (that took more than 5 seconds 25 years ago). It's not using any CPU, and there's nothing I can do but kill the process.
In the past, I've occasionally got my system into a state where Codewright would hang on loading, due to some other program that hadn't terminated correctly, and it was unfrozen by killing off that other process. So that's reason to believe that Codewright is waiting at some global lock which some other malfunctioning software is holding. So I have two questions:
Does this ring a bell? Is there some known failure mode where a program putting up a splash window then switching to another window can be prevented by something else going on the system?
Is there a way to diagnose this, perhaps by finding out what system call it's hanging inside? I tried dtrace.exe, started Codewright, and then stopped tracing, and it produced a 3GB XML file, which is quite a haystack. There's a way to filter it by PID, but since this is a startup problem, I have no idea what the PID will be. Is there a better tool for doing this, or some more appropriate dtrace feature that I missed?
The comment about using the Task Manager to create a dump file actually led me to notice that there is an Analyze Wait Chain function there that I had never seen before, since I haven't used Task Manager much since I switched from Win7. This gave me exactly the answer I wanted. My editor was waiting for something that was being held by some NVIDIA GeForce Experience module. Since I don't use that, I uninstalled it, and I'm back up and running. Thanks for the tip.
Summary
When putting the monitor in sleep mode in Windows 10, Windows seems to execute some tasks that don't get executed with the screen on.
This is interfering with our software, and we need to get rid of it.
Ful story
For a hardware device with a touch screen, I need to be able to turn off the touch screen when it's not in use, for durability reasons. Windows has a message that you can send to turn it off, SC_MONITORPOWER. More specifically:
SendMessage(hwnd, WM_SYSCOMMAND, SC_MONITORPOWER, 2);
This works fine, but when the screen is off, Windows is apparently sometimes performing some tasks that it doesn't do when the screen is on. We are careful to never write anything to the screen in this situation (that causes huge problems when the screen is off, in fact just having a blinking cursor in a DOS box is using up half a core when the screen is off).
Our software requires a callback to be executed every 0.25 ms. We have turned nearly every task, service and several other things in Windows off, and with the screen on, I can run our software for days without ever missing a callback. But with the screen off I get hiccups. The callback already runs at the highest possible priority.
So there is apparently something that we missed when we turned all services and tasks off. There appear to be 2 causes of hiccups:
One happens once every 10-30 hours or so (not sure of the exact time, it seems to vary). But it always happens 5 times, with EXACTLY 5 minutes (at most a few milliseconds off) in between (so in total it happens 5 times in a 25 minute period).
Beside this, we get a single hiccup typically every 4-10 hours, but the time between occurrences doesn't seem to be very constant so there could also be multiple causes.
I'm a bit at a loss here, and running analysis software can easily interfere with our own software, making it harder to detect when these hiccups really occur and when they are caused by running the analysis software.
Interestingly, I have seen this 5-times-every-5-minutes thing also on a completely different system (different hardware, different OS version), when recording audio in Adobe Audition. Audition misses pieces of audio every 5 minutes in this case, and I think it also only happens when the monitor is in sleep mode and you're not logged in remotely.
We have already tried to turn the touch screen off using direct monitor commands like Nircmd does, and it doesn't support those. My guess is that the SC_MONITORPOWER message is triggering more things in Windows, and if we can turn them off, that would fix our problem. Any ideas?
System
Intel i5-8700 with 6 cores, Windows LTSB, no extra software installed except our own.
Never mind, problem solved. It was not an extra task that was being started, it was one of the existing Windows processes that for some reason only causes issues when the display is off. Since killing them is not an option (Windows will just restart them), I've suspended the following processes, and the culprit is one of these (I don't know which one yet):
sihost.exe
igfxEM.exe (I very much suspect this one)
RuntimeBroker.exe
dllhost.exe
taskhostw.exe
explorer.exe
I have to continue testing a bit longer to be absolutely certain, but so far with these tasks all suspended I've not seen a missed callback in the last 38 hours. I don't know yet if there are any drawbacks to suspending all these things, so I'll try to find the cause(s) and suspend only that/those.
Fresh installation - plugins disabled, no malware. Chromium runs without delays. Firefox on every other action, including typing every now and then - takes 3-5 second pauses, sometimes displays a running wheel when the delay is even longer.
Started at certain point in time. De-installation/re-installation didn't cure. Running as a single process didn't cure. Latest version.
Any ideas what can be causing this, specifically for the Firefox?
Upgrade to v67 - I remember reading some glitch has been removed in prior versions that might have been causing this behavior.
Also, another idea would be not to limit your cache to a very low space.
+1 to move this question to SuperUser.
My Raspberry Pi keeps freezing after a few hours of activity. It often happens at exactly 17 minutes past the hour so I'm suspecting this might be related to a cron job. When I look into /var/log/syslog after rebooting, I see that each freeze comes right after a flurry of activity that always starts with this line (You can see the entire log output following that line, all the way to the point a freezing at https://pastebin.com/m1dmferU):
Aug 13 13:17:05 raspberrypi rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="8.4.2" x-pid="486" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] start
So I'm wondering if something related to rsyslogd might be causing this.
FYI: After the freeze the monitor is dark and unresponsive.
I'll be grateful for any help!
marc.
On a clean installation of Octave 3.6.4 for Windows MinGW on a Windows 7 machine, octave takes around 30 seconds to start every time. From what I have seen elsewhere, this is far from normal.
By "take 30 seconds to start" I mean from the time that I enter octave on the command line or initialize the octave.exe executable, it takes consistently 30 seconds to give the octave:1> prompt. Otherwise, it runs quite quickly, start-up is just agonizingly slow.
Something possibly relevant is that when watching resource manager, the octave process first peaks quickly in CPU usage as soon as it is called, then totally disappears in terms of CPU usage, than peaks again as it finally comes up.
I have searched for any other instances of this happening, and was unable to find any. This happens without loading any packages.
I'm guessing that your command prompt is starting octave at a very slow rate. Personally, I prefer using Console2 as an enhancement for the command prompt as you can set a path of the octave.exe and have it automatically load up in the window once you start Console2. It also gives you other additional features. This might or might not fix your slow start problem but I think it's worth a try:
http://robertcorvus.com/how-to-run-octave-in-console2/