Arch Linux

Pelikan

Member

Registered: 2009-03-10

Posts: 11

Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

Hi,

i've encountered a weird problem lately. Like the title says my desktop freezes for a few seconds randomly during the day (on average every 10min for about 5 seconds). I cannot do anything besides moving the mouse pointer. After these 5 seconds the system resumes normal operation. There are no error messages or anything. I'm not quite sure as to which update caused this problem. I'm suspecting the kernel or the proprietary NVIDIA driver.
Has anyone else experienced this?

tlvb

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2008-10-06

Posts: 297

Website

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

If you suspect the proprietary NVIDIA driver, have you tried the open source one or using vesa?
'No error messages' do you mean no popups or have you checked stuff in /var/log and dmesg?
Do you use compositing? If so does the problems continue after turning it off?

Last edited by tlvb (2011-03-30 02:02:24)

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ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,350

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

Thoughts that form in my head:

What is the environment ?  KDE? Gnome? Xfce4? Awesome? *box?

Is there disk activity during these times?
You say there are no error messages, did you check the logs?  Any chance you are having disk errors?
Are you into your swap space and depending on virtual memory? (Is the system thrashing due to page faults?)

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Mustard

Member

From: Noblesville, Indiana

Registered: 2010-03-02

Posts: 39

Website

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

I have some faint recollection of thread in which some had an issue with the UI locking up for a short period.  It was in Gnome and related to the .xinitrc file and dbus.  Don't know if this is related at all, but it might be an angle.

Pelikan

Member

Registered: 2009-03-10

Posts: 11

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

I'm using Gnome without any compositing. There are no messages in any log files. Swap is unused. The nouveau driver doesn't work for me somehow, can't even start X. The disk activity is very low, i'm only running VDR in the background. I think It's more than just the UI locking up because video and sound also stop working. Everything freezes except for the mousepointer. I can still move the pointer around.

I'm using this system for over a year now and never had this problem.

Edit:  I now turned ON compositing and it seems to be gone away, wtf?

Last edited by Pelikan (2011-03-30 21:00:27)

limaunion

Member

From: Argentina

Registered: 2011-03-11

Posts: 40

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

I'm having the same issue, everything frozen except for the mouse pointer, i'm new here running archlinux since a week ago using Gnome + Compiz + Nvidia drivers. Can you tell me how to enable 'compositing' in order to check if that also solves the problem here? is that a compiz setting?
Thanks!

Numb

Member

Registered: 2011-04-03

Posts: 1

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

I'm having the same issue, everything frozen except for the mouse pointer, i'm new here running archlinux since a week ago using Gnome + Compiz + Nvidia drivers. Can you tell me how to enable 'compositing' in order to check if that also solves the problem here? is that a compiz setting?
Thanks!

Yeah, same issue here. I can only move my mouse pointer. It affects Compiz and KDE with effects enabled.

Btw. what is your Graphics Card?

limaunion

Member

From: Argentina

Registered: 2011-03-11

Posts: 40

Re: Desktop randomly freezes for a few seconds

Here's some information about my video card:

description: VGA compatible controller
          product: C67 [GeForce 7150M / nForce 630M]
          vendor: nVidia Corporation
          physical id: 12
          bus info: pci@0000:00:12.0
          version: a2
          width: 64 bits
          clock: 66MHz
          capabilities: vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
          configuration: driver=nvidia latency=0
          resources: irq:19 memory:f4000000-f4ffffff memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:f0000000-f0ffffff memory:c0000000-c001ffff

During the last two days I haven't seen a new freeze, it seems to be very random, at least here.