On 01/17/2011 10:52 AM, Adam Williamson wrote:
Hi, folks. Before I file a bug on this I was wondering if anyone else had seen it and hoping to get a better idea of exactly what's happening.
Lately, on this machine - a laptop running F14 - it seems that every so often, gnome-settings-daemon, firefox and one other process (I forget which, something else that's part of GNOME I think) suddenly go crazy, pegging out the CPU (which is dual-core) entirely and also showing huge virtual size (virt column in top) - in the 60-70GB range. One thing that sometimes triggers this is, sometimes, trying to play some music in audacious; usually it works, but sometimes it returns 'input/output error', PulseAudio crashes, and this bug happens immediately. But sometimes the same problem with gnome-settings-daemon and firefox happens without being triggered by loading music.
Has anyone else seen this? Any ideas what's going on?
No idea, but I often see similar: F14 x86_64 laptop (2GB ram), firefox w/Flash Square. Just when I really need to use the computer, the load average goes through the roof (> 8). The machine starts swapping, firefox's memory usage grows large (multi-GB), and the machine becomes *very* unresponsive until whatever it was trying to do finally finishes. Sometime I can fix it by logging out and logging in again, other times I have to reboot. Right now my load average is around 3.3. That seems a bit high for a system not doing very much other than writing an email (thunderbird) with about 30 different tabs open in firefox not doing anything, and 4 gnome-terminals open waiting at command prompts.
I too suspect that firefox and audio is at the heart of the problem, but I can't prove it.