17.10 and frequent gnome-shell crashes/freezing

[goodstuff9]

Ubuntu 17.10 (X.Org 1.19.5), gnome shell 3.26.2, kernel 4.13.0-43-generic, Intel(R) Core(TM) i5-4460 CPU @ 3.20GHz (4 cores), 15.5GB RAM

Frequently - at least a couple times each day - my system freezes for about two to five minutes. Audio continues to play, and I can move the mouse pointer, but everything else is "frozen". Then after a few minutes, all goes back to normal.

It all appears very randomly, I have not been able to notice any pattern to it. Sometimes the computer will go for hours and hours without this problem. Other times, it will freeze up four or five times per hour over a period of a couple hours. Sometimes this happens after the computer is completely booted up, I have logged in, and the desktop has appeared. Other times it freezes immediately after I have logged in and pressed "ENTER", but before the desktop has even appeared.

I look in /var/crash and I will always see an error logging file for the crash that just happened. Its name is always of this format: _usr_bin_gnome_shell...... I don't know how to interpret the cryptic information in that file, plus that file is often up to a couple hundred MB in size.

How do I figure out what is wrong, what is causing these crashes, and how to fix the underlying problems?

[deadflowr]

Perhaps you might consider upgrading to 18.04 since 17.10 is about to go to bed in a couple of days now.
There are a considerable number of fixes 18.04 provides over 17.10.
So you might see if any of those fixes helps you.

[monkeybrain20122]

Perhaps you might consider upgrading to 18.04 since 17.10 is about to go to bed in a couple of days now.
There are a considerable number of fixes 18.04 provides over 17.10.
So you might see if any of those fixes helps you.

+ 1 to getting 18.04. Just one thing, I would advise against "upgrade" which is generally problematic but in your case 17.10 is having issues so instead of leaving possibly corrupt settings behind you should back up your files and do a clean install for 18.04.

[goodstuff9]

So, it took me a while, I agree, the fresh install of 18.04 was what I should do. Now that I have that done and 18.04 is running...... I STILL have the same problem.

Well, not exactly the same problem. So far since running 18.04, I have not had gnome crash while using my computer. However, every single time I boot up my new 18.04 installation, the boot process hangs for about three minutes. When it finally completes and I finally have a desktop, I always have two logs: gnome-software crashes, and gnome-tweaks crashes. These are different from the logs I would get before 18.04, those were about gnome-shell. I haven't had crash logs about gnome-shell since going to 18.04. Sooooo......

Any ideas on how I go about diagnosing this problem, and getting it fixed? Simplistic idea here - Could it help if I were to reinstall gnome-software and gnome-tweaks?

[dragonfly41]

Any ideas on how I go about diagnosing this problem, and getting it fixed?

I can't help with ideas on the likely cause of your crashes. However I find that the log analysis tool "petit"
helps in making sense of long and indecipherable log files. Look for frequent patterns.

http://crunchtools.com/software/petit/

[goodstuff9]

Thanks for the suggestion, I finally had time to try it out.

I see that I frequently get the results I show below. However, I have no idea if it means anything. Does anything jump out at you? I can understand if you say you don't know what it means either, so at this point I have this additional question: Where do you think I should turn to try to figure out what this may be telling me?

main1@system1:~$ petit --hash --fingerprint /var/crash/*.crash
62: #-# r--s #:# /var/cache/fontconfig/#-l#.cache-#
62: #-# rw-p #:#
22: #-# ---p #:#
4: #-# r--p #:# /home/main#/.local/share/flatpak/exports/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache
4: #-# r--p #:# /var/lib/flatpak/exports/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache
2: 7f4c38002000-7f4c38005000 r--p 00000000 08:01 7078802 /home/main1/.local/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache
2: 7f4c38011000-7f4c3801a000 r--p 00000000 08:01 92367 /usr/share/icons/Adwaita/icon-theme.cache
2: 7f4c2808c000-7f4c280a8000 r--p 00000000 08:01 17282 /usr/share/icons/gnome/icon-theme.cache
2: 7f4c38005000-7f4c38011000 r--p 00000000 08:01 10465 /usr/share/icons/hicolor/icon-theme.cache
2: 7f4c2800a000-7f4c2808a000 rw-s 00000000 00:05 753667 /SYSV00000000 (deleted)

[dragonfly41]

My approach is to take patterns from the frequently recurring reports.

From your shortened report I would search for "crash NEAR /var/cache/fontconfig" in google search field.
To understand what NEAR means in search pattern you need to research google advanced search syntax.

You need to look for clues then run google search on the clues (text patterns).
But be prepared to go down blind alleys as you focus on recurring text patterns.
I would also add in other log files once you become experienced with using petit.

[Added note]
Using the above approach I found this ..

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/bugr...cgi?bug=216649

which just shows that fontconfig can cause crashes.

I would investigate what fonts you are using and how to update caches.

[dragonfly41]

I should add this note of clarification.
Specifically for /var/crash/ dumps you can try using crash (you might need to install crash as package).

https://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/crash-analyze.html

I use petit for analysing syslogs.