--- "Kevin J. Cummings" cummings@kjchome.homeip.net wrote:
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.
The only times things like this happens to me is when Flash misbehaves. Jump to tty2 and run htop or top (whatever you like -- htop just makes this more obvious) and see which process is freaking out and kill it.
And while we're talking about flash (and not to start a flame war, just to present some humor)... This awesome quote was posted the other day on a security mailing list in a thread about all the holes that have emerged in Flash lately:
"Personally, I kind of like Flash. It gives me a single kill switch for 90% of the useless blinking crap and popups on the internet. Flash is a really appropriate name for exactly what I don't want to see on a web page. I hope it remains the platform of choice for those who develop such things." - Marsh Ray
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