Random half-second lags

maomao123 · 2020-09-19 17:55:46

Hi all,

I'm getting sporadic half-second lags that happen sometimes every 30 s, sometimes only every few minutes. By lag, I mean either a video freezes on a frame briefly, or my mouse cursor freezes and then jumps, or the last letter I typed doesn't show for a second, then a bunch of them appear (kkkkkk) as if I had been holding the key down (even though I'm just typing normally). At first I thought this was just because I had too many tabs open, but if I restart and restore all my tabs I don't get this issue; it's only after a few days that this issue pops up. I'm thinking maybe this is a memory leak, but I'm not sure how to track it down - any advice?

I'm on Arch 5.4.50 LTS, Gnome on Wayland. This is what I get from

free -h

              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           15Gi        13Gi       240Mi       1.6Gi       2.1Gi       346Mi
Swap:          19Gi       5.1Gi        14Gi

Thanks.

Ropid · 2020-09-19 22:48:54

Do you also see these kind of short freezes when your memory usage is lower and swap is not in use?

This kind of freeze where even the mouse cursor stops for a moment can happen if something (code or data) that's needed for redrawing the screen is inside swap and has to be loaded from disk.

maomao123 · 2020-09-19 22:54:53

Thanks for your reply! I don't think so - is there a way to tell if my system is leaning too much on swap?

nanter · 2020-10-06 00:49:45

I've been having the exact same problem on my computer.
Every 30 or 60 seconds the whole system freezes for a second. When playing a video/audio, the last second of the audio plays again, like if it was trying to catch the correct timing again, and then goes back to where it was.
It started when I ran a sudo pacman -Syu last than two weeks ago. I've been trying to downgrade video and xorg related packages to try to find the one that introduced the issue, but no luck so far.

seth · 2020-10-06 07:13:51

ssh into the system and run some continuous output on the remote shell, eg.

i=0; while true; do printf "$((i++))\r"; sleep 0.1; done

and see whether the counter continues during the stall to see whether this is a visual issue (and the video player simply re-syncs the AV buffer, leading to the audio replay)

maomao123 · 2020-10-10 19:46:39

nanter wrote:

I've been having the exact same problem on my computer.
Every 30 or 60 seconds the whole system freezes for a second. When playing a video/audio, the last second of the audio plays again, like if it was trying to catch the correct timing again, and then goes back to where it was.
It started when I ran a sudo pacman -Syu last than two weeks ago. I've been trying to downgrade video and xorg related packages to try to find the one that introduced the issue, but no luck so far.

this has been an issue for me longer than that (actually it used to be worse before a Gnome memory leak was patched a few months ago). Usually audio continues normally for me (e.g. for videos and zoom calls), it's just the video that lags

Arch Linux

#1 2020-09-19 17:55:46

Random half-second lags

#2 2020-09-19 22:48:54

Re: Random half-second lags

#3 2020-09-19 22:54:53

Re: Random half-second lags

#4 2020-10-06 00:49:45

Re: Random half-second lags

#5 2020-10-06 07:13:51

Re: Random half-second lags

#6 2020-10-10 19:46:39

Re: Random half-second lags

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