Arch Linux

stopperw

Member

Registered: 2024-07-22

Posts: 3

Random system stuttering/freezes (maybe because of IO problems)

When using my system, I constantly get freezes. They may be of different length or intensity.
I think it might be happening because of IO... something? The problem happens from time to time for random reasons, but when doing stuff like downloading from Steam or copying large files, it would happen more frequent and hard.

I actually found a consistent way to trigger it:
I would run the script (http://0x0.st/XpuK.sh) to fill a 4GiB file with random data and while doing it, the system would already start lagging, but at some moment the operation just pauses and the whole system becomes unusable. I demonstrated it using holding Enter in terminal, making a new line, which in normal circumstances is instant, but not while this lag occurs.
At that moment doing basically anything is impossible - Alt+Tab or launching an app would just kill the system for some time.
Here is the demonstration - https://youtu.be/-oHTIlRHTLI

Logs:
sudo journalctl -b | curl -F 'file=@-' -i 0x0.st
http://0x0.st/Xp9V.txt
(You can see here I'm running a zen kernel with 8G of RAM (was trying to test the RAM), unfortunately I tried the same with vanilla kernel and 16G of RAM and nothing changed.)

Hardware:
EDIT: mobo ASUS TUF Gaming B450M-Pro Gaming
AMD Ryzen 5 2600X
16G RAM
NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1050 Ti (proprietary drivers, latest nvidia on linux and latest nvidia-dkms on linux-zen)
Apacer AS350X 1 TB as a boot drive

Troubleshooting steps:
Disconnecting all but the boot drive, testing the ram (with MemTest86+ and windows ram test, no issues found), putting different RAM sticks in different slots, trying the same in Windows (the problem is less obvious, but the dips to 0 speed while copying are visible), flashing the latest BIOS, disabling fTPM, resetting all BIOS settings, removing all USB devices but keyboard, increasing Swap (32G on separate partition)

Last edited by stopperw (2024-07-25 16:23:31)

xerxes_

Member

Registered: 2018-04-29

Posts: 1,056

Re: Random system stuttering/freezes (maybe because of IO problems)

Look here:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293400
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=297996
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/n … ers/260304

stopperw

Member

Registered: 2024-07-22

Posts: 3

Re: Random system stuttering/freezes (maybe because of IO problems)

Look here:
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=293400
https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=297996
https://forums.developer.nvidia.com/t/n … ers/260304

Looks like the posts here relate to laptop issues with GPU shared RAM, while I have a PC with a dedicated GPU with it's own VRAM. Sorry if there were some confusion.
Also, don't think it's VRAM related, as it is happening even when VRAM usage is very low.
In any case, I tried downgrading to nvidia 550 and nothing changed:

pacman -Q | grep nvidia
lib32-nvidia-utils 550.90.07-1
nvidia-dkms 550.90.07-1
nvidia-utils 550.90.07-1

Also, no foreign AMD drivers (related to https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … #p2186184):

pacman -Q | grep amd
amd-ucode 20240703.e94a2a3b-1

gromit

Administrator

From: Germany

Registered: 2024-02-10

Posts: 1,524

Website

Re: Random system stuttering/freezes (maybe because of IO problems)

Which filesystem are you using?

stopperw

Member

Registered: 2024-07-22

Posts: 3

Re: Random system stuttering/freezes (maybe because of IO problems)

Which filesystem are you using?

ext4