Arch Linux

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

[SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

I have installed Arch in my work desktop a month ago (solo OS; no dual boot) and experiencing frequent crashes at various occasions at least twice a day. During the crash, the applications in the desktop freezes, mouse clicks don't work but the mouse pointer can move freely. After about 20 to 60 seconds, the crash resolves and the desktop functions as normal.

At first, I thought it should be because of the latest GNOME desktop (ref this post: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=225870) so I tried KDE. The graphics did seem a whole lot smoother but the crashes were twice as much frequent.

So I went for broke and installed a minimal XFCE. The crashes still occurred. I even tried moving to an LTS linux kernel, still the same.

I'm unable to figure out what is going wrong. How to stop these crashes? The following is a detailed description of my hardware and how I use the OS on a daily basis.

- i7-2600, 16 GB RAM, 500 GB HDD, Nvidia GeForce GT 630 Graphics.
- System monitor on the system tray (CPU and network load refreshes every 2 seconds and RAM and disk access status refreshes every 5 seconds)
- 4 workspaces tiled as a grid with a terminal always on in one workspace and firefox quantum in an other
- Each workspace has a different wallpaper (similar setup for all desktop environments I have tried)
- Jupyter Notebook (Anaconda)

Apart from the random crashes, a crash can also be reproduced by rapidly switching between workspaces (through keyboard shortcuts).

This never occurred to me when I was running Ubuntu in a Core 2 Duo processor with 2 GB RAM (no matter how reckless I am with the tiled workspaces).

How to fix this? Please help.

Last edited by Ebe (2018-04-14 08:35:50)

jasonwryan

Anarchist

From: .nz

Registered: 2009-05-09

Posts: 30,426

Website

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

Look at your journal and Xorg logs.

Moving to NC...

---

Arch + dwm   •   Mercurial repos  •   Surfraw

Registered Linux User #482438

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

Do you mean by running

journalctl

? The output is huge; I don't know how to use it. Could you please tell me what options should I supply with it?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

If it just happened during the running session

journalctl -b

will contain the info just from that boot, read https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Sy … ing_output for more options

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

Okay. I'll just restart the computer, then juggle the workspace, and apply journal -b command once the crash occurs.

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

I'm not sure what am I looking for; the ouput still looks large.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

Post it here, in code tags

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

I'm unable to submit; the page says that the request entity is too large. I'll try again after another reboot to make the logs shorter.

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

I still get the following error when I try to submit the log

413 Request Entity Too Large

Do I still have to apply some sort of filter after the -b flag to the journalctl command?

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

The screen does not crash when I juggle workspaces with no applications open. I also noticed that the system is more prone to crashing when the RAM has more cached content, close to 90%, (noticeable in the system tray widget). My RAM is composed of four RAM chips of 4 GB each, could this attribute to the problem I am facing?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

Upload it to some file sharing site in doubt, otherwise look for errors, segfaults and coredumps.

However this recent info might help as well, run a memcheck maybe one or more of your RAM sticks went bad

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

Thanks for the info. How do I do that, Videl?

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,435

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Ge … g_hardware

Ebe

Member

Registered: 2017-11-16

Posts: 23

Re: [SOLVED] Frequent crashes in Arch desktop in any Desktop Environment

SOLVED! Finally, found the culprit: the Walkpaper Gnome extension; disabled it and had no more crashes.

I installed it to have different wallpapers for each of my workspaces (4 of them).
Also did a similar setting in XFCE which seemed to be the problem in that DE.

The crashes usually occured when
- the OS caches a lot of memory in the RAM
- I log in after lock
- the workspaces are switched rapidly

After disabling the extension, the crashes stopped occurring.
The crash does occasionally occur when I log in after a lock, but it is very rare and recovers quite quickly.

Thank you for your service, Videl.