Arch Linux

isochor89

Member

Registered: 2020-09-15

Posts: 11

[Solved] OS responsivness very low, programs keep constantly freezing

Hello everybody,

I am again facing issues after installing and setting up the system. I would be glad If someone could point me into a direction for solving it.

problem description
If I use a program for several minutse e.g. I browse the internet via firefox, I can't switch to other programs e.g. spotify, rambox without facing tremendous lags. If I switch from Firefox to Spotify to change a song, it will not be played immediately. If I select another song (or several), while the old one is playing and while I am still waiting for response, after a few minutes Spotify will switch songs in the corresponding order I clicked the songs.

It doesn't seem to be the problem of Spotify: If I change from Firefox to Rambox to write or read something in Whatsapp I can't select a user or a group I am currently interested in. I have to wait a few seconds. Very often the system sends the message, that the program is not responding and asks me If I want to terminate the process. rambox also freezes while in use. I was writing a message and in the exact same moment where I got a message from another person, rambox froze. After a few seconds it worked again, without the necessity of restarting the program.

Same thing goes with the volume button in the KDE-Taskbar. Switching from an open program to the volume button I can change the position of the volume slider, but to acutally change the volume I have to wait a few seconds.

I have 2 kernels on my system and I face the problem with both of them (linux-lts 5.4.67-1 and 5.8.11-arch1-1)

This problem happens all the time even after a restart. I don't have other user programs open besides of the mentioned ones above.

System:    Host: archDesk Kernel: 5.8.11-arch1-1 x86_64 bits: 64 Desktop: KDE Plasma 5.19.5 Distro: Arch Linux 
Machine:   Type: Desktop Mobo: MSI model: B150M MORTAR (MS-7972) v: 2.0 serial: <superuser/root required> 
           UEFI [Legacy]: American Megatrends v: C.D0 date: 06/27/2018 
CPU:       Info: Quad Core model: Intel Core i5-6500 bits: 64 type: MCP L2 cache: 6144 KiB 
           Speed: 1139 MHz min/max: 800/3600 MHz Core speeds (MHz): 1: 1139 2: 1166 3: 1106 4: 1281 
Graphics:  Device-1: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 [Radeon RX 5600 OEM/5600 XT / 5700/5700 XT] driver: amdgpu 
           v: kernel 
           Display: x11 server: X.Org 1.20.9 driver: modesetting unloaded: vesa resolution: 1920x1080~60Hz 
           OpenGL: renderer: AMD Radeon RX 5700 XT (NAVI10 DRM 3.38.0 5.8.11-arch1-1 LLVM 10.0.1) v: 4.6 Mesa 20.1.8 
Audio:     Device-1: Intel 100 Series/C230 Series Family HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Device-2: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD/ATI] Navi 10 HDMI Audio driver: snd_hda_intel 
           Sound Server: ALSA v: k5.8.11-arch1-1 
Network:   Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet driver: r8169 
           IF: enp6s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 4c:cc:6a:4b:5c:95 
Drives:    Local Storage: total: 953.87 GiB used: 304.41 GiB (31.9%) 
           ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: A-Data model: SX8200PNP size: 953.87 GiB 
Partition: ID-1: / size: 199.21 GiB used: 28.19 GiB (14.2%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2 
           ID-2: /boot size: 482.48 GiB used: 276.22 GiB (57.2%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3 
Swap:      ID-1: swap-1 type: partition size: 40.09 GiB used: 0 KiB (0.0%) dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1 
Sensors:   System Temperatures: cpu: 35.0 C mobo: 29.8 C gpu: amdgpu temp: 31.0 C 
           Fan Speeds (RPM): N/A gpu: amdgpu fan: 962 
Info:      Processes: 266 Uptime: 1h 20m Memory: 31.31 GiB used: 7.21 GiB (23.0%) Shell: Bash inxi: 3.1.06 

My approach
There are many topics regarding arch linux freezing. My linux system froze also today morning constantly and replicable. If I opened Firefox, went to google maps and clicked a random city, the whole system was frozen and I had to restart the system. I "solved" this issue by switching from kernel linux-lts 5.4.67-1 to 5.8.11-arch1-1

But the problem that I am facing right now seems to be some kind of scheduler problem? I read the following article:
Improving_performance#Tuning_kernel_parameters
and there is a topic regarding the scheduler and how I can change it. But frankly I don't know the details of scheduler, we had this topic in general in a computer science lecture, but I don't know yet If the descriebed problem is because of a configuration of a scheduler.

I could paste the output of:

 journalctl -b-1 

but it consists of over 3500 lines. It doesn't seem to exist a spotify or rambox.log

Thanks !

Last edited by isochor89 (2020-09-27 17:07:18)

mkkot

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2009-12-20

Posts: 287

Re: [Solved] OS responsivness very low, programs keep constantly freezing

It can be issue with /etc/hosts file pointing localhost to wrong address. Please show the file and commands: hostname and dnsdomainname.
You can read more about how to set /etc/hosts here: https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ne … e_hostname

You can also try to disable ipv6 for tests.

Second thing, show us the RAM usage:

 free -h 

Also, logs:

systemctl -b-1 >file

and paste link to your logs into a service like pastebin.com

Last edited by mkkot (2020-09-27 14:49:55)

Morn

Member

Registered: 2012-09-02

Posts: 886

Re: [Solved] OS responsivness very low, programs keep constantly freezing

Maybe KDE is just freezing/laggy on your system? So I would try a different window manager or desktop environment: fvwm, jwm, WindowMaker, Budgie, Gnome,... (I have recently switched from KDE and Gnome to jwm, so my vote goes to that one at the moment.)

Slow network shares or connections can also block the system for several seconds, so maybe disable WiFi or Ethernet and see if that changes anything.

isochor89

Member

Registered: 2020-09-15

Posts: 11

Re: [Solved] OS responsivness very low, programs keep constantly freezing

uff.. I have many things to learn yet. The problem was not there because of RAM-Usage because:

[xx@archDesk ~]$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           31Gi       3.1Gi        25Gi       342Mi       2.8Gi        27Gi
Swap:          40Gi          0B        40Gi

The hostname seems to be correct also. I don't have issures with Ipv6 so far. At least I get a lot of DNS traffic (advertisement...)

The error was indeed connected with Spotify even though I faced the lack of responsiveness in other programs, which didn't seem to be connected to spotify at all. But sure there is a connection, because both run as GUI-Programs under KDE. @Morn

root cause
I disabled notification for Spotify through the system settings of the KDE-Desktop. Spotify was not happy about this setting at all, because the notifications were still enabled in the settings of Spotify. In order to fix the problem I had to disable the notifications also in Spotify.

The lessons learned here would be:
If I run KDE as desktop and I disable notification for a specific programm, I have to check the settings of respective programs for notifications and also disable them there

Thank you both for help!

p.s. found the solution here: https://medium.com/@CodyReichert/fix-sp … e955710776

mkkot

Member

From: Poland

Registered: 2009-12-20

Posts: 287

Re: [Solved] OS responsivness very low, programs keep constantly freezing

Hah, had this but didn't think about this. Check this out, my bug report:
https://gitlab.xfce.org/apps/xfce4-noti … #note_4127