On Mon, Jan 17, 2011 at 3:52 PM, Adam Williamson awilliam@redhat.com 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?
I've seen this issue earlier in the Fedora release cycle. I saw is with g-s-d plus a bunch of random apps including (from mem) firefox, evolution, pidgin etc. This is a dual core i5 with hyperthreading (OS sees 4 cpus). It seemed that it was mostly due to constraints on RAM and I think it was made worse by the fact that I run a LUKS encrypted disk as it made matters worse when things had to swap. The problem improved greatly when I went from 2 to 3 gig of ram and I rarely see it now I have 4 (not that its an excuse), I don't think the problems fixed.
Oeter