Cannot start applications after a long while (some standbys?)

[moir]

I'm having a small problem with both my kubuntu installs since about natty, maybe a bit in maverik as well, and I can't seem to find a bug or any other reference to it.

What happens is, after the computer has been left unattended a long while (days or sometimes hours, always after standbys or suspends) I cannot start any X applications, even from the command line. When I go to logout, all the applications I requested start, start up. Naturally, after logging back in everything works normally.

This isn't a big deal; just a minor annoyance. But what I do find strange is that there is apparently no one else out there suffering this problem. My desktop and laptop are very much different installs (wireless vs wired, nvidia vs fglrx, and even previously x86 vs amd64). I recently moved my desktop to amd64, which required a complete fresh install, and the problem carried.

This can't be a fresh bug can it? Am I really the only one suffering it? Any suggestions on what to check out during the error condition before thinking about filing a bug? Dbus seems quiet.

[67GTA]

Re: Cannot start applications after a long while (some standbys?)

I found a really old bug report, but no solution. Seems it is rare. Is there anything in your logs to indicate what is happening? https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/52200

[moir]

Re: Cannot start applications after a long while (some standbys?)

Thanks!

The symptoms fit and gives me a place to start. I didn't notice anything strange in the logs but I'll look a bit closer.

[GreyGeek]

Re: Cannot start applications after a long while (some standbys?)

When that hang happens, can you open a Konsole or shell and issue:

env | grep DISPLAY

It should give you

DISPLAY=:0.0

[moir]

Re: Cannot start applications after a long while (some standbys?)

Finally got it to happen again.

My DISPLAY variable was :0 but changing it to :0.0 didn't help

I guess I was wrong about all applications. Fortunately I had a terminal open this time and very simple X applications like xeyes are starting. The most modern application I could find that would run was gnome-about.

I suspect something is going very wrong with the session dbus. I can monitor the system bus and it seems normal, but get nothing when I run
dbus-monitor --session
Trying to send messages over the session dbus with dbus-send causes dbus-send to hang. I can dbus-send over the system bus though.

There do seem to be a bunch of dbus-daemons running though:
$ ps -ax | grep dbus
Warning: bad ps syntax, perhaps a bogus '-'? See http://procps.sf.net/faq.html
795 ? Ss 0:37 dbus-daemon --system --fork --activation=upstart
1602 ? Ss 0:00 /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/startkde
1605 ? S 0:00 /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/bin/startkde
1606 ? Rs 156:43 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
2397 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
3834 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 5 --print-address 7 --session
3896 pts/3 S+ 0:00 grep dbus
5912 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
25302 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
31401 ? Ss 0:00 //bin/dbus-daemon --fork --print-pid 4 --print-address 6 --session
$

(I'm affected at this moment. I'll try logging in and out and seeing what's different, but first I'll try killing off some of those.)

[moir]

Re: Cannot start applications after a long while (some standbys?)

Aha, it was the 1606 process that was holding everything up. (at least I think, after killing off some dbus-daemons things were getting pretty flaky). I'm assuming this one is rather essential though, since it's apparently started right at login. It was running with ~12% cpu time which I guess would be pretty heavy on a single core.

But I'm not seeing anything spamming the dbus.