hard system freezes while running amarok (+ firefox)

[ssri]

Hey everyone,

In the past two weeks, I suffered hard system freezes (twice) while running amarok 1.4.10, firefox and other programs (Kubuntu 8.10, 4.1.3 & 4.1.4). When it occurs, the audio sputters and repeats the same note incessantly, a la Windoze BSOD when playing an audio file. The only way to recover from this is to perform a hard shutdown (poweroff). The maddening thing about it is that, apparently, the events surrounding this freeze do not appear on the system logs. I suffered a kdm crash an hour earlier of this freezeup, and have logs of the events surrounding it. However, non of the events around this freeze appear to be recorded, at least in the system.log. I remember reading about a bug pertaining to the layout engine of firefox (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...ox/+bug/107093), but I can honestly say that I never suffered through this problem while running firefox. Only when I play mp3s off of my mounted SATA drive (NTFS) through amarok do I experience this freeze, though it occurs only once in a blue moon. However, the devs supposedly fixed the SATA bug that causes such a system freeze during the release of Hardy (https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+s...3g/+bug/198533). I lost quite a bit of work when this crash occurred (mostly in jvm's), and I do not want to continue to use kubuntu if I have to constantly worry about system freezes and lockups, which is a shame because I think, barring this current problem, I am considerably more productive in this environment than windows.

[dibl]

Re: hard system freezes while running amarok (+ firefox)

The maddening thing about it is that, apparently, the events surrounding this freeze do not appear on the system logs.

I don't think there there is any system freeze -- I think there's a problem with amarok, probably, or perhaps the sound system. There's no system log because there's no system problem, and the logs can't anticipate your finger hitting the power switch. :P

Open a Konsole window and run

top

Then open a second Konsole window - this is the one you will use to kill the offending process, maybe.

Then run Amarok and observe what's going on in the "top" window. Hopefully you'll see some process using 100% of the system resources. Note the process ID number, then use your other Konsole window to kill it.

If it "freezes" and you find the keyboard not responding, when you try to kill the process that is using all the CPU resources, use the Alt-SysRq RSEIUB method to restart the system:

http://kubuntuforums.net/forums/inde...opic=3088251.0


Once you have ID'd the problem process, we'll know how to approach fixing it.