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#1 2019-09-25 15:10:20

gpc
Member
Registered: 2017-02-23
Posts: 6

Pacman upgrade from 2019-09-14 to 2019-09-20 causes short freezes

After upgrading on September 20th I started getting freezes every few minutes or so, lasting a few seconds each, while playing Terraria (same version of Terraria).

Rolling back to September 14th fixed the problem.

Just FYI interesting why this would happen. I have previously had problems with freezes seeming related to disk usage such as when I enabled swap but before changing swappiness to minimum. After rolling back even with using up all the RAM and some swap with other programs while running Terraria, I did not observe freezes.

Last edited by gpc (2019-09-25 15:38:37)

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#2 2019-09-25 15:43:10

xerxes_
Member
Registered: 2018-04-29
Posts: 662

Re: Pacman upgrade from 2019-09-14 to 2019-09-20 causes short freezes

You could give more info: what hardware and drivers (especially graphics), what desktop environment, how started, what game (Linux native or played with wine/lutris, etc.).

You could try to setup zram, i.e. RAM compressed part of memory which is a lot faster than swap. I use it because I don't have much RAM, and I'm satisfied. It is used when free RAM ends, then when zram ends, swap is used. There are a few compression algorithms, default lzo-rle algo is very light.

You can setup zram according to this, but do one bigger zram0 swap, not two smaller. Size may be even 1,5 bigger than your amount of RAM. And set swappines to default then. When you set up it, reboot. You can check zram and swap usage by 'zramctl' or 'swapon --show' .

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#3 2019-10-03 14:10:17

djg1971
Member
Registered: 2008-09-11
Posts: 185

Re: Pacman upgrade from 2019-09-14 to 2019-09-20 causes short freezes

Hi - for what it's worth I've been experiencing "freezes" too, but for a couple months not just since 9/14. The problem seems to manifest from a couple of types of activities, and I have discovered a fix of sorts...have assumed people would notice this and it would just get fixed, but apparently not so much. My examples:

* when scrolling in a web browser (firefox), the window will inevitably hang...if you don't want to wait for the problem to somehow clear itself up, you can click on another tab, or double-click on something, and that tends to restore functionality until the next time it "freezes."

* same sort of thing happens when using thunderbird...double-click on basically anything and then it'll start responding again.

Sorry to be less helpful, but I've been too busy to explore, experiment, cut and paste logs, etc.

My system is a fujitsu laptop running gdm and openbox. pacman -Syu has been done without incident several times recently.

I'm going to continue to assume that eventually this will be noticed and fixed, and the problem will someday go away. Until then, or until I get less busy, I'll use my workarounds and live with it since it does not actually hobble the machine - just irritating because it slows you down...

cheers.

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#4 2019-10-03 14:47:30

djg1971
Member
Registered: 2008-09-11
Posts: 185

Re: Pacman upgrade from 2019-09-14 to 2019-09-20 causes short freezes

Actually, I should amend my previous post...I just did a full pacman -Syu 5 minutes ago, and after booting up again, firefox and thunderbird freeze much worse - every couple seconds guaranteed, and clicking with the mouse does not necessarily fix the problem as before. It was so bad I had to boot into the fallback selection via grub. Something this wrong will probably be noticed...? (note that shells and so on do not appear to be affected at all.)

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#5 2019-10-03 16:03:23

loqs
Member
Registered: 2014-03-06
Posts: 17,192

Re: Pacman upgrade from 2019-09-14 to 2019-09-20 causes short freezes

@djg1971 please start a separate thread for your issue.  As you yourself noted the issues started during different time frames.
Please also include diagnostic information:  https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=57855

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#6 2019-10-05 14:14:13

gpc
Member
Registered: 2017-02-23
Posts: 6

Re: Pacman upgrade from 2019-09-14 to 2019-09-20 causes short freezes

FYI I'll probably not follow up further as haven't noticed freezes anywhere else.

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