Arch Linux

HappyClown

Member

Registered: 2015-08-15

Posts: 161

[SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

My computer seems to freeze about once every day, sometimes more frequently than that. When it freezes, I can't open up the terminal via ctrl+alt+F1/F2. My machine isn't set up to use SSH and I know it isn't a kernel panic because my keyboard LEDs are not flashing. It seems that an application IS NOT flooding my memory. It seems to happen after doing something web-based such as loading a flash object after the machine has sat idle for a few minutes. It seemed to have started freezing after installing google chrome but I think it freezes even if the process isn't running. How could I solve this problem?

Last edited by HappyClown (2015-08-24 14:11:08)

ayekat

Member

Registered: 2011-01-17

Posts: 1,591

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

Perhaps some process is not correctly reaping its children - have you checked whether you've got defunct processes?

ps aux | grep defunct

This is just a wild guess, though - I remember having had the same problem when I forgot to wait on my window manager's child processes, and once every few days my machine froze.

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pkgs │ hacks │ cfg │ blag

HappyClown

Member

Registered: 2015-08-15

Posts: 161

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

Output of that command is:
user  2679  0.0  0.0  10728  2296 pts/0    S+   03:13   0:00 grep defunct

I don't quite know how to read the syntax. It seems to be a good possibility, since chromes processes have been sketchy on Windows machines, too although it never froze my old computers.

ayekat

Member

Registered: 2011-01-17

Posts: 1,591

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

Output of that command is:

user  2679  0.0  0.0  10728  2296 pts/0    S+   03:13   0:00 grep defunct

This means `grep` only finds itself - there don't seem to be any defunct processes.

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pkgs │ hacks │ cfg │ blag

patresi

Member

Registered: 2015-02-12

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

I've been having the same problem, but like you, I have no idea what is causing it...

I've been reading about stress testing and I've been running mprime in the background but I haven't had any crashes while running it, only when it's stopped...

I try to always have /proc/kmsg visible to see if something shows up before the crashes but no luck... I don't know where to go from here

Last edited by patresi (2015-08-21 14:10:48)

HappyClown

Member

Registered: 2015-08-15

Posts: 161

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

I've actually just noticed something that could be relevant to the problem. It seems that when chrome has been running for a longer period of time, the more youtubes HTML5 player lags. After killing all processes and reloading them, it stops lagging. What's causing it to lag in the first place? Any ideas?

HappyClown

Member

Registered: 2015-08-15

Posts: 161

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

Never kind. Are you by any chance running tor in the background? Restarting the process every 12 hours seems to have solved the problem for me.

patresi

Member

Registered: 2015-02-12

Posts: 8

Re: [SOLVED] Machine sometimes freezes

No, I'm not running anything, the only thing that stops my laptop from freezing seems to be running "mprime -t" in the background to keep the CPU at 100%...