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System seems to hang, windows lose borders, KDE bar disappears, file-max limit reache

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    System seems to hang, windows lose borders, KDE bar disappears, file-max limit reache

    I recently updated to 12.04.1. I've noticed now for three weeks in a row, when I come back on Monday (having simply left my system, neither logging out nor locking the desktop), that the system is now unusable: one time the desktop would not "relight", and twice now where I would see some windows, but their borders (with the menu, minimize, maximize, and close buttons) were gone along with the main KDE taskbar. In all three cases I've had to powercycle my computer. Note that this does not happen on weekdays (where I'm leaving the system overnight) -- it's only weekends that this happens.

    The X log gets overwritten at boot time, but the older syslogs do show errors of the file-max limit being reached. One entry in syslog looks like this:

    kernel: [222812.725881] VFS: file-max limit 305812 reached

    This kind of error repeats itself, and further entries in syslog show similar errors ("Too many open files", etc). I would guess that it's at this point that KDE and/or X is now hosed and I have to reboot.

    I suppose I could try to figure out how to increase the maximum number of files, but you'd think 305,000 would be "enough"....

    This was never a problem in 10.04.4; I could (and did) leave the system for weeks (vacation) and when I returned, could resume exactly where I had left it.

    #2
    Your symptoms indicate kwin or plasma-desktop has crashed. I suspect you've got some process going crazy, burning open files; I'm not surprised things die if the limit on open files has been reached.

    You might try pressing ctrl-alt-f1 to get a text console, and logging in there, but if the process that opens all those files hasn't died, you may not be able to log in. If you can, running lsof might be interesting. Maybe running it at the end of the day might show a problem beginning.

    Do you know about the "Magic SysRq key"? Raising elephants is so utterly boring? Read about it on Wikipedia. Perhaps if you kill X with Alt-Sysrq-k you might restore sanity.

    There's various reports shown in google. A bug in NFSv4 caused this problem, and ask ubuntu has a report of KDE's plasma-desktop doing it in July, see
    http://askubuntu.com/questions/15814...rs-memory-leak
    though that user reports the bug being fixed very quickly.

    Regards, John Little
    Regards, John Little

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