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Thread: How to diagnose unresponsive desktop?

  1. #1
    Join Date
    Aug 2006
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    gypsy encampment
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    608
    Distro
    Lubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

    How to diagnose unresponsive desktop?

    This morning, while addressing Christmas cards, I had several applications running. At some point during the session, my desktop environment (Unity 3D) became unreponsive for several minutes at a time. My trackpad pointer would move, I could click on applications or Dash Home in Launcher, could attempt to minimize an application but no response at all until a minute or two passed.

    I had GRAMPS, Rhythmbox and Firefox (maybe 2 tabs open) running when this occurred. I suppose Update Manager could have run in the background, but I had already manually updated earlier.

    Would anyone have any ideas where I could look to attempt to diagnose this? I didn't see anything in Log File Viewer. Googlubuntu didn't seem to have anything definite that I could find.
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  2. #2
    Join Date
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    Lubuntu 18.04 Bionic Beaver

    Re: How to diagnose unresponsive desktop?

    bump
    Reminder: If you start a thread asking for help with a problem, please remember to use the Thread Tools to mark the issue as "SOLVED" once you have a solution. This will help other people with the same problem when they search for answers.

  3. #3
    Join Date
    Oct 2011
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    34

    Re: How to diagnose unresponsive desktop?

    Try top? (top in terminal)

    The data output should look roughly like the below. Not sure if you could get to it if your computer is currently unresponsive, but grabbing this right after your system begins to respond again will also provide useful information.

    top - 11:42:30 up 14:21, 5 users, load average: 2.45, 2.39, 2.32
    Tasks: 169 total, 1 running, 168 sleeping, 0 stopped, 0 zombie
    Cpu(s): 31.0%us, 7.8%sy, 0.0%ni, 60.3%id, 1.0%wa, 0.0%hi, 0.0%si, 0.0%st
    Mem: 2965228k total, 2472520k used, 492708k free, 207196k buffers
    Swap: 4057084k total, 0k used, 4057084k free, 1086928k cached

    (Probably incredibly stupid idea but actually something I've done before: Installed the ssh server package*, ssh'ed in from another computer, made ssh priority -5, and watched top whenever original computer became unresponsive. If you do this,

    Code:
    ps aux --forest
    also provides really useful information

    * I also like turned all the security settings to the max - my account only, different port, etc. so wasn't being completely stupid.)

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