10.10 freezes up, randomly becomes unresponsive

[walruspanzer]

Two fresh installs of maverick meerkat on my laptop. Both times, problems started immediately. Playing media files, web browsing with a few tabs, or running bittorrnet freezes my humble system.

• Video files fail
• Music glitches
• Programs take over 50 seconds to maximize
• Gnome interface unresponsive
• Mouse movement is cumbersome and frustrating
• Text input takes absurdly long
• Chrome wants to kill every page that's open.

For between 1 and 4 minutes, I'm unable to do even the most basic computer task.

While running top during the lockup, I observe that any program running actively hog major resources, the main culprits are:

• deluge
• chrome
• firefox
• vlc
• rhythmbox
• totem
• transmission
• Xorg
• compiz

At some point or another during a lockup, the active programs running use up all of my CPU and a sizable chunk of RAM. Then after a few minutes, it stops and goes back to running normally for a bit.

There seems to be no common element that sparks this behavior. Anything I do causes my computer to freeze for 2 minutes. It seems to be a common issue as well, and I've been unable to resolve this substantial problem. Is there some bugfix I am missing?

I'm really thinking about either downgrading back to 10.04, or giving up ubuntu all together. It used to work great out of the box, but now it seems to be more trouble than I can deal with.

[bonius]

I had similar problems with Maverick. At first I thought my old hardware was to blame, but then I installed xfce4 and logged in with that, and everything was quite snappy again.

Maybe something changed in gnome that makes is more resource hungry in 10.10 than in 10.04?

[walruspanzer]

I have been interested in both xfce and linuxmint for a bit now. My concern is time, I work 65 hours a week and fear that I would be getting in way over my head switching to a different distribution. I'm no power user and my fear is having to learn a whole new interface and losing some of the humble ubuntu customizations I've made to my computer over the years. Is it easy to switch and customize?

[bonius]

Yes, it's quite easy to switch back and forth. just install xubuntu-desktop, and then from the login screen, select it from the session menu. If it doesn't work for you, log out and pick the gnome option from the session menu.

[Spartako]

Same here, maverick freezes randomly, but here the freeze is a total lockdown, I mean I can't even switch to TTY1.
I think it isn't related to the system load, I tried to force the freezing by starting a lot of programs, like GIMP, spotify on wine, lots of tabs in firefox, evolution, emphaty etc, and the system worked perfectly without freezing surprises.
Then I just restarted, launched firefox, visited some web pages, and BAM. with just firefox and one tab.
Restarted, launched spotify (wine), hear some music, BAM.
Restarted, GIMP, firefox, geany, etc... no freezes.
I don't understand this freeze behaviour, is there anyone with the same problem? any clues?


PS: I'm running an old Acer Ferrari 4000 (perhaps this is the problem)

[Spartako]

anyone?

[antitude]

Same here, maverick freezes randomly, but here the freeze is a total lockdown, I mean I can't even switch to TTY1.
I think it isn't related to the system load, I tried to force the freezing by starting a lot of programs, like GIMP, spotify on wine, lots of tabs in firefox, evolution, emphaty etc, and the system worked perfectly without freezing surprises.
Then I just restarted, launched firefox, visited some web pages, and BAM. with just firefox and one tab.
Restarted, launched spotify (wine), hear some music, BAM.
Restarted, GIMP, firefox, geany, etc... no freezes.
I don't understand this freeze behaviour, is there anyone with the same problem? any clues?


PS: I'm running an old Acer Ferrari 4000 (perhaps this is the problem)

I have exactly the same problem. Just installed Ubuntu yesterday, due to being tired of getting BSoD in Windows 7.

Damn, I love Ubuntu when it works, like it does on my netbook for instance, but when it doesn't... well.

[Kareeser]

Weird behaviour including slowdowns can't be diagnosed with certainty because practically anything can cause them. In your case, you're seeing multiple unrelated programs start to hog the CPU for several minutes, at which point your computer is nearly unresponsive.

The best thing you can do now is try to provide more information - can you take a look at some of the log files (maybe error.log, or messages) to see if there are any messages present that correspond to the times when you experienced slowdowns?

[matty_b_1000]

I have what I think is the same problem with a brand new Thinkpad SL510. It's usually triggered by DVD playback but occasionally by normal use, manifesting as choppy playback or an unresponsive cursor.

My /var/log/messages isn't interesting reading:

Jan 2 15:15:14 Franklin rsyslogd: [origin software="rsyslogd" swVersion="4.2.0" x-pid="758" x-info="http://www.rsyslog.com"] rsyslogd was HUPed, type 'lightweight'.
Jan 2 15:27:40 Franklin kernel: [ 1489.855023] lo: Disabled Privacy Extensions
Jan 2 15:27:52 Franklin kernel: [ 1501.975032] exe (2269): /proc/2269/oom_adj is deprecated, please use /proc/2269/oom_score_adj instead.

But my syslog.1 contains a bunch of these:

Jan 2 15:04:55 Franklin kernel: [ 124.566774] hda-intel: spurious response 0x0:0x0, last cmd=0x23902c
Jan 2 15:04:55 Franklin kernel: [ 124.605791] hda-intel: spurious response 0x0:0x0, last cmd=0x23902f
Jan 2 15:04:55 Franklin kernel: [ 124.643703] hda-intel: spurious response 0x0:0x0, last cmd=0x239032

Is this any help?

[william_nbg]

I just set up a new computer and installed 10.10, and was having a similar problem with firefox freezes, but I noticed I somehow installed both open jre and Oracles jre. I removed open jre and that seemed to fix the problem.