Desktop locking up / temp freezes

stevend · 2025-04-13 00:45:06

Hi all,

I have a installation of Daedalus, I've been running it since January and I keep running into an unpredictable issue where the desktop locks up for minutes at a time, the longest I've seen is almost an hour but usually it is more like 20-30 minutes. And then it will suddenly come good and behave as normal.

System:

Devuan GNU/Linux 5 (daedalus) 64 bit
Xfce version 4.18
GTK version 3.24.38
Kernel version 6.1.0-27-amd64
Intel Celeron N4500 @ 1.10GHz x 2
3.6 GiB RAM, 976 MiB swap
Mesa Intel UHD Graphics (3.6 GiB) GPU

(Aside: is there a way to copy and paste the displayed text in the "About the Xfce Desktop Environment" window, instead of re-typing it by hand?)

Here is my graphics card:

$ lspci -k | grep -iA2 'vga\|display\|3d'
00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation JasperLake [UHD Graphics] (rev 01)
	DeviceName: Onboard - Video
	Subsystem: ASUSTeK Computer Inc. JasperLake [UHD Graphics]

When the freeze happens, it is most common when I'm running a web browser (I've tried Firefox and Brave), often but not always on pages with embedded videos, especially ads. But I've also experienced it in Thunar when opening a folder with hundreds of files.

Behaviour:

The mouse either stops responding completely, or keeps responding but with extreme amounts of lag, dozens of seconds or even minutes. In other words, I will move the mouse and a minute later the mouse pointer on screen will move.
The keyboard appears to stop responding completely.
Desktop elements stop responding, including the clock on the panel.
Hard drive activity light on the PC flashes. Not abnormally fast, just a steady beat which continues for an abnormally long time.
Sometimes a random desktop application in the background will close, but generally not.
Browser tabs will frequently crash.

I have tried to monitor the situation with top, but usually the freeze happens so fast top doesn't get a chance to update its display and I can't see anything out of the ordinary. However, I did once manage to see that the system load reached at least 83. (After that top stopped updating its display until by the time it updated again, the load was dropping fast.)

Unfortunately none of this is reproducible or predictable -- I can browsers dozens of video-heavy pages without problems, view Youtube videos, scroll through Twitter (sorry Elon, it will always be Twitter to me) threads with dozens of videos with no problems, *until I can't* and there doesn't seem to be any consistent difference between the pages I can view with no problem and the pages that cause the freeze.

E.g. viewed five or six Youtube videos, fine, then clicked the "Expand" button to show a mere 11 comments and the desktop locked up for eight minutes.

But for what it's worth I've never had it happen on a Wikipedia page, and almost never on old.reddit pages. But it has happened here on dev1galaxy

Is this a known problem? Preferably with a known solution? I've searched the archives but not found anything that seems helpful.

How can I diagnose what is going on? Are there logs I should be looking at?

Thanks in advance for any help.

swanson · 2025-04-13 07:51:18

I don't really know, but ads can be taxing and multpile tabs/pages. Try Ublock Origin adblocker, if you haven't already. Works nicely with Firefox on my rig [Daedalus]. Blocks all ads on Youtube.

PedroReina · 2025-04-13 08:24:45

Maybe we couldn't get nothing from my idea, but I would run a RAM checker, such as
https://www.memtest86.com/
Sometimes odd things happen when the OS reaches some previously unused RAM areas.

Last edited by PedroReina (2025-04-13 08:29:40)

delgado · 2025-04-13 10:25:08

Sounds like a hardware problem.
I would pull out and insert again all RAM modus and PCI extension cards. This makes new electrical contact.
Since the PC has no external graphics card, this most likely means the RAM, as Pedro guessed before.

chris2be8 · 2025-04-13 16:09:20

When it's locked up will ctrl-alt-f1 get you to a text console? (Try this when it's OK to see what to expect, ctrl-alt-f7 to get back to GUI.)

Have you got another system you can use to ssh onto it from? Running top from the ssh session should give you some more info.

Does anything interesting appear in any of the logs?

greenjeans · 2025-04-13 16:49:57

Symptoms sound exactly like what happens when ram gets maxed out and starts spilling over into swap, Devuan's pretty robust for me so it takes a lot to make it happen, like multiple browser tabs + starting some other programs. Like you OP I only have 4 gigs of ram.

Conky display is helpful, I have mine set to display ram and swap usage in addition to other things, and the few times i've had this happen to me it's always that ram got maxed out and there will now be content in the swap partition.

I've got an old 2005 machine that runs, but it only has 1 gig of ram, so it's super-easy to make it happen, maybe 4 browser tabs and it gets sloooooooooowww....

Duke Nukem · 2025-06-02 12:24:47

That has happened to me three or four times too, but with 12Gb of RAM, 26Gb of swap, and uBlockOrigin. It has always happened when in YouTube, either playing a video or just scrolling down the comments. Ctrl-Alt-F1 (or any other F key) did nothing, and I have had to switch off the PC and reboot. Must admit, I have not tried waiting for an hour.

My theory is that it is YouTube, which seems to do all sorts of weird stuff. Sometimes it is extremely slow, like taking 5 seconds per character when I am typing a comment, but closing and re-opening the window speeds it up again. A few months ago it would keep freezing the video then resume after you jump forward a few seconds ("L" key"), but that behaviour has gone. YouTube are known to be waging a war on adblockers so maybe they are trying to stuff dog-knows-what into your PC, which they assume is on Windows of course, and they keep trying new angles : that's my theory anyway.

BTW, shouldn't you swap area be larger than your RAM?

steve_v · 2025-06-02 13:08:46

Youtube (as with much of the "modern" web) can and will cause your browser to consume fairly insane quantities of memory...

The behaviour of the linux kernel under heavy memory pressure can be somewhat pathological (at least for desktop workloads, where killing memory hogs early is preferable to compromising interactivity), in that memory reclaim may livelock for quite some time (especially when swap is involved), and the OOM killer will only trigger once all other avenues are exhausted (i.e. potentially many minutes of thrashing, swapping pages in and out, and repeatedly evicting the page cache). Paradoxically, this is often exacerbated by fast (ssd or nvme) swap devices.

There are ways to tune this, but the easiest solution for desktop use is probably a more proactive OOM killer such as earlyoom, nohang, oomd, or (obviously not here) systemd-oomd.
Better explanations of my statements above can be found in the first two linked repos.

Duke Nukem wrote:

shouldn't you swap area be larger than your RAM

Only if one intends to use it for suspend-to-disk.

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#1 2025-04-13 00:45:06

Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#2 2025-04-13 07:51:18

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#3 2025-04-13 08:24:45

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#4 2025-04-13 10:25:08

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#5 2025-04-13 16:09:20

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#6 2025-04-13 16:49:57

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#7 2025-06-02 12:24:47

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

#8 2025-06-02 13:08:46

Re: Desktop locking up / temp freezes

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