Ten years ago I was told that one of the strengths of Linux was that if an application went down it didn't take other processes with it. Sadly this no longer seems to be true.
Today I had used GIMP to make a scan of 200MB. When I tried to save it it started, but then went into Disk Sleep. XSane and, believe it or not, Libre Office Calc became zombies, responding to nothing that I could find in System Monitor. Eventually, remember previous episodes, I asked for a system restart. The shutdown began, then hung, leaving me with no option but to power down.
I know these are not KDE applications, but tracing the parentage through System Monitor, it seems to go back to kdeinit (from memory - possibly inaccurate).
This isn't the first such episode I've seen, though it's the worst for a while. It's exceedingly frustrating!
Anne
On 04/07/2011 09:45 AM, Anne Wilson wrote:
Ten years ago I was told that one of the strengths of Linux was that if an application went down it didn't take other processes with it. Sadly this no longer seems to be true.
Hi,
well an application cannot bring the system down but sent all other programs to swap so the system is slow down to a crawl.
I saw the above two or three times,
in a ocasion amarok grab a 1.5Gb of RAM (2Gb RAM total), RES field from top so all other apps were sent to the swap, so the system was unusable but I always have a top instance running in a terminal so with a littlr patience I killed the amarok process, and the system eventually recovered his responsiveness.
in other ocassion was vlc in that case, I will not be able to switch to the virtual desktop having the top running, the graphics was stuck, but I was able to login to ssh and after running top and press M I found vlc and killed it, but that took 4 or 5 minutes.
Today I had used GIMP to make a scan of 200MB. When I tried to save it it started, but then went into Disk Sleep. XSane and, believe it or not, Libre Office Calc became zombies, responding to nothing that I could find in System Monitor. Eventually, remember previous episodes, I asked for a system restart. The shutdown began, then hung, leaving me with no option but to power down.
what format was saving to, I know which jpeg will be slow down the system because that size and jpeg compression isn't practical
but maybe your problem is totally diferent, maybe next time if you run top that give some light about the problem.
regards,
Gabriel
On Thursday 07 April 2011 19:22:36 Gabriel Ramirez wrote:
what format was saving to, I know which jpeg will be slow down the system because that size and jpeg compression isn't practical
I was saving to png.
but maybe your problem is totally diferent, maybe next time if you run top that give some light about the problem.
When I know something is unstable I tend to run System Monitor, for the same reason, but when things happen out of the blue you are stuck. If I have Konsole open at the time, that's fine. If I haven't, it's no go.
Anne
On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 03:45:19PM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
Ten years ago I was told that one of the strengths of Linux was that if an application went down it didn't take other processes with it. Sadly this no longer seems to be true.
Today I had used GIMP to make a scan of 200MB. When I tried to save it it started, but then went into Disk Sleep. XSane and, believe it or not, Libre Office Calc became zombies, responding to nothing that I could find in System Monitor. Eventually, remember previous episodes, I asked for a system restart. The shutdown began, then hung, leaving me with no option but to power down.
remember to check /var/log/messages and watch dmesg when you hit strange problems like that, it is certainly unexpected that a 200 MB scan would nuke your system. It might be a flaky USB drive rthat got into way or something like that.
Richard
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On Thursday 07 April 2011 21:12:27 Richard wrote:
On Thu, Apr 07, 2011 at 03:45:19PM +0100, Anne Wilson wrote:
Ten years ago I was told that one of the strengths of Linux was that if an application went down it didn't take other processes with it. Sadly this no longer seems to be true.
Today I had used GIMP to make a scan of 200MB. When I tried to save it it started, but then went into Disk Sleep. XSane and, believe it or not, Libre Office Calc became zombies, responding to nothing that I could find in System Monitor. Eventually, remember previous episodes, I asked for a system restart. The shutdown began, then hung, leaving me with no option but to power down.
remember to check /var/log/messages and watch dmesg when you hit strange problems like that, it is certainly unexpected that a 200 MB scan would nuke your system. It might be a flaky USB drive rthat got into way or something like that.
I knew that there is a known limit for size, but didn't expect it to be anywhere near that low. I did the same scan again later, with the same result. After the next reboot I did it again with 200dpi which produced a meagre 31KB scan. That saved without a problem.
There's not much chance of monitoring anything while it is actually happening unless I can do it from the command line in a second terminal - which I haven't tried, but will do next time I see it. All KDE utilities seem to be brought to the knees when this happens.
Anne
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Anne Wilson -
Gabriel Ramirez -
Richard Z