Plasma crashing regularly

[TWPonKubuntu]

Kubuntu 16.04, Dell D820 laptop, 4Gb ram.

Starting with todays update, Plasma is crashing about every 5 minutes, no matter what I am doing.

The crash report utility will not send a crash report (not enough useful information found).

Does anyone else experience this?

[MoonRise]

Currently no but I have not applied updates in a while. I will do that now and let you know.

[Snowhog]

I have no problems with 16.04. Plasma runs just fine. We need more details as to what you have running; your graphics card; Desktop Theme and Desktop Effects settings. Things like that.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Snowhog: Hmmmm... I tried to reply to your post while running 16.04 but I cannot access the various utilities to read my hardware configuration. So I've switched hard drives and am using 14.04. Which mean I'm unable to give a whole lot of information about plasma config under 16.04.

Let me clarify what I mean by "plasma crashing", I get a crash report popup. When I work through the crash report steps, it tells me that insufficient information can be determined and does not send the crash report.
While I am using the crash reporter, plasma will reboot and continue working, only to fail again in a few minutes...

4.0Gb RAM
32bit system
Dual Intel processors, T2400
Video processor: NVidia G72M [Quadro NVS 110M/GeForce Go 7300]

When I attempted to check the 16.04 system drivers, the system did not respond (no action on screen)/

I recall that I'm running OpenGL 2.0
I have changed themes to get away from the "transparent" widgets and desktop icons which are part of the default installation.
I do not remember the specific name for the new theme.

At this point, the system is so fragile that I may just do a full reinstall.

Another point, which has been on-going since the initial install is that RAM reported by a desktop widget shows steadily increasing usage, starting with about 200MB and slowing growing to about 2.3GB. Somewhere after that, the system will lockup, forcing a hard reboot. This is NOT a new phenomena on the 16.04 installation.

Thanks for your input.

[Snowhog]

That RAM usage is steadily increasing 'may' be a significant indicator, especially if an application and/or a process/processes aren't releasing memory when closed/finished. When this memory usage increase is observed; when it get's up to the 2+GB range, do you have a browser running, and if so, how many tabs are open in it?

[TWPonKubuntu]

I've been watching to see which application(s) is/are causing the RAM usage, but see no obvious correlation. Yes, I do run the Firefox browser (Ver. 47.0), but RAM usage increases when I play KPatience card games or run Konsole for system updates. I usually have from one to four tabs open in FF.

I usually have Thunderbird email client running too.

I'd have to do more testing to identify a particular piece of software that runs while the RAM increases. Let me get back to you on this as it will take a day to do.

I note that when Plasma crashes, the RAM usage does not change, as reported by the desktop widget. When I use the System Activity Monitor (Ctrl-Esc), there is no single process which shows this kind of RAM usage, nor have I seen any increases in RAM usage reported by the Monitor. More testing is needed here.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Ok, I looks like it is mysqld called by parent akonadiserver.

This is happening when I open a tab in Firefox, or even just change webpages.

Each time, my RAM usage widget shows a jump of about 100MB (0.1 GB). When I close Firefox, it takes a very long time, if ever, for the RAM usage to fall.

I'm at 2.2GB RAM usage now and I can see the mysqld RAM usage (in System Activity monitor) increase when I open a new tab or change web pages.

[TWPonKubuntu]

I closed Firefox, RAM usage reported by the desktop widget fell 0.1GB. Restarted Firefox and opened Kubuntuforums.net but now no change in RAM usage (still 2.2GB).

Opened a second tab in FF but no change in RAM usage, and no change in mysqld RAM usage.

[NoWorries]

I use htop to see what is really going on in such cases. If you install it you may find it gives more details on system usage than that provided by KSysGuard. I do find that once the offending process is shown by htop, KSysGuard is useful for killing it.

[TWPonKubuntu]

Noworries, I'll try htop, thanks.

[TWPonKubuntu]

htop shows approx 30 processes, all mysqld called by akonadiserver and all showing 25% MEM usage. They all are referencing mysql.conf in my home directory .local/share/akonadi/mysql.conf

I have no clue what/why akonadi needs to have so many processes running on the same file.

Looking at System Activity, the processes seem to be calling each other... probably not a good thing.

I used System Monitor to kill the mysqld process called by akonadiserver. RAM usage dropped immediately by 900MB.

I'm rebooting to see if akonadiserver comes back online

[TWPonKubuntu]

On restart, I'm watching the RAM usage (desktop widget) slowly rising, without my doing anything. I starts at about 455MB and is now at 1.3GB and rising.

The mysqld processes called by akonadiserver are back, about 30 of them.

Also I see seven commands to "/user/sbin/plasmashell --shut up"

Plasma shell crashed again and restarted

RAM usage is now a 1.5GB and rising...

RAM usage is still slowly rising as reported by htop, now at 2.2GB and two plasma crashes later.

My frustration level is rising along with RAM usage <g>.
It looks like akonadiserver may be the culprit here, but I've no idea how to stop it from doing whatever it is doing... I can kill the process(es) but the return on reboot.

[jlittle]

...
The mysqld processes called by akonadiserver are back, about 30 of them.
...

That'd be 30 threads; they share most memory maps, that's why they can all show 25%. The overhead of having 30 threads instead of, say, 2, can be just the process table entries, so in itself isn't an indication of anything excessive. My 16.04 mysqld has 27 threads, and shows as using 123 MB of memory.

Regards, John Little

[TWPonKubuntu]

Jlittle, Thanks, I think I'm going to do a reinstall when I can get access to a higher bandwidth connection, probably Monday.
More later and thanks to all for the feedback.