Arch Linux

snufkin

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2008-11-08

Posts: 71

Computer hangs for a couple of second about once per minute

Not sure if I'm in the right forum or not, but hey, it happened after an upgrade.

I have a problem with my computer (Asus UX31E) since I did an upgrade. However, since I normally suspend my computer and only reboot after every five upgrade, I'm not sure what upgrade's causing it. The problem I have is that my computer's rendered fully unusable for a few seconds every now and then (sometimes once/minute, sometimes up to five times/minute). All I can move is the mouse cursor, everything else's stuck. If I however type in a text box, or click on a button, it gets registered as soon as my computer wakes up from its unintentional sleep. The computer then "wakes up" after 1-10 seconds.

When scrolling through my pacman.log, I've found some things that might be the bad guy:

[2013-09-27 13:33] [PACMAN] upgraded glibc (2.18-4 -> 2.18-5)
[2013-09-27 13:33] [PACMAN] upgraded lib32-glibc (2.18-4 -> 2.18-5)
[...]
[2013-09-27 13:33] [PACMAN] upgraded linux (3.11.1-2 -> 3.11.1-3)
[...]
[2013-09-28 12:18] [PACMAN] upgraded linux (3.11.1-3 -> 3.11.2-1)

Please note that I'm not sure at all that these packages have anything to do with my problem, but they're my best guess.

Unfortunately, since I first thought this was a disk space problem (I was running quite low on space, reaching into just bytes remaining) I cleared the pacman cache, so a downgrade is impossible.

karol

Archivist

Registered: 2009-05-06

Posts: 25,440

Re: Computer hangs for a couple of second about once per minute

You can still downgrade with https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/ARM

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 19,774

Re: Computer hangs for a couple of second about once per minute

I would suspect I/O errors or something else that hangs up the kernel.  Are there any interesting messages in the journal or in the logs?
Also, which desktop environment are you using?  Some of them get rather, er, busy, doing their own thing (cough, KDE, cough)

---

Nothing is too wonderful to be true, if it be consistent with the laws of nature -- Michael Faraday
Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine. -- Alan Turing
---
How to Ask Questions the Smart Way

snufkin

Member

From: Sweden

Registered: 2008-11-08

Posts: 71

Re: Computer hangs for a couple of second about once per minute

Alright, I tried to downgrade a few packages (first time I fucked up completely, had to reinstall the entire system,  but that's not part of the story). Anyhow, I'm currently using all the latest packages except for systemd. I'm using version 204-3 now, and the problem is mostly worked around (same problem, only very small and rare hang-ups - mostly occuring when a program uses a lot of CPU).

So, is there a known problem with systemd causing this? I'll upgrade one version at a time tomorrow, to find out what version (and hopefully even what commit) is causing this, but as of today I'm satisfied to have learnt that systemd's the cause of this.