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Serge2702

Member

From: México City

Registered: 2014-01-14

Posts: 73

[Solved] Weird "sleep" process in Gnome

Hello. When I'm using gnome 3.12 there is a weird process called "sleep". It appears on gnome system monitor and in top.

It doesn't appear on other Desktop Environments. I have two separate Arch installations, and it appears on both of them.

The weird thing about this process is that apparently it kills and restarts itself very fast, because it's PID is always increasing. After a while it's PID is at the 100000's. Because of that I can't select it in gnome system monitor so I can stop it. Also I can't stop it using kill because of the same reason.

I made a quick search in the Bugs reports and I couldn't find any info. Does anybody knows anything about this process?

Last edited by Serge2702 (2014-05-01 15:27:59)

ondoho

Member

Registered: 2013-04-30

Posts: 692

Website

Re: [Solved] Weird "sleep" process in Gnome

man sleep

it's most probably some other process that has to wait for something, using sleep. perfectly normal.
the "5.6 MiB" and "604.0 KiB" look more worrying. what are the headers for that?

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: [Solved] Weird "sleep" process in Gnome

You can use htop's tree view to see if it's being periodically called by some other process.

Serge2702

Member

From: México City

Registered: 2014-01-14

Posts: 73

Re: [Solved] Weird "sleep" process in Gnome

The 5.6 MiB is virtual memory, and th4 604 KiB is resident memory. Thanks ondoho, your info gave me an idea for finding the culprit.

Some time ago I installed gnome-shell-themes-elegance-colors from the AUR. It's a gnome shell theme editor, and supposedly it changes the shell theme when you change your gtk theme. Then I thought that maybe that used sleep for monitoring the changes. There was a process called "Elegance colors", and when I killed it, the sleep process disappeared. Well, it seems that I have to uninstall it now. Thanks.

ooo

Member

Registered: 2013-04-10

Posts: 1,638

Re: [Solved] Weird "sleep" process in Gnome

You don't need to uninstall it. The elegance-colors process isn't required for the theme to work in any way. You just need to disable it from starting with gnome, which unfortunately may be bit of a hassle since gnome-session-properties was removed with 3.12.

Simplest way would be removing /etc/xdg/autostart/elegance-colors.desktop.
Moving it to ~/.config/autostart/ and editing the file to prevent it from starting would possibly be more elegant.

I've done the latter myself by emptying the Exec= variable, but I believe commenting out the AutostartCondition= line would work as well.

ondoho

Member

Registered: 2013-04-30

Posts: 692

Website

Re: [Solved] Weird "sleep" process in Gnome

glad you found it.

on a side note:

5.6 MiB is virtual memory, and th4 604 KiB is resident memory.

this seems quite a lot for even multiple sleep processes.