Plasma frozen...requesting help major ASAP pronto!!!

[integr8e]

I've already filed a bug report about this issue, but the bug dudes haven't yet been able to find the cause:

Plasma (+/- Xorg) will freeze on me occasionally, especially when running Firefox...this has just happened to me on my laptop and I'm writing now from a desktop PC with it (laptop) beside me. I was able to switch to one of the consoles, where I may now work on it via CLI.

It is still running, and - not currently very good at troubleshooting difficult software bugs - I was hoping some of you could help me determine the root of this issue; here's what I've done so far:

- "top" revealed 3 application using >= 50% CPU (my laptop has a Core2 Duo processor) - plasma, Xorg, and VirtualBox

- I decided to kill plasma and try restarting it so my work wouldn't be lost:

~$ ps axo comm,pid | grep plasma
plasma	12488
~$ kill 12488
~$ /usr/lib/kde4/bin/plasma
	<unknown program name> (30367)/: Cannot connect to the X server
	plasma(30368): KUniqueApplication: Cannot find the D-Bus session server
	plasma(30367): KUniqueApplication: Pipe closed unexpectedly.

- I decided to check whether Xorg and D-Bus were still running:

~$ ps axo comm,pid,pcpu,pmem | grep Xorg
Xorg	12289	7.0	9.0
~$ ps axo comm,pid,pcpu,pmem | grep dbus
dbus-daemon	5352	0.1	0.0
dbus-launch	12460	0.0	0.0
dbus-daemon	12461	0.0	0.0

- I was running Vista in VirtualBox so I could complete a VB homework assignment with VisualStudio, and wanted to "gracefully" shut it down via CLI because I've heard horror stories about Window$ VM's becoming extremely unstable after the VM is suddenly killed:

~$ VirtualBox --help
Qt WARNING: VirtualBox: cannot connect to X server

And that's as far as I've gotten; can somebody please help me troubleshoot this issue so it can be resolved, PLEASE?

[dibl]

Re: Plasma frozen...requesting help major ASAP pronto!!!

Yep -- plasma again. My Kubuntu Hardy Heron + KDE4 system has been running trouble-free for 4.5 days, but I got up this morning to find (a) the screen not blanked by the power saver and (b) plasma hogging the CPU. Here's the top of top:

 6945 dibl   20 0 1612m 1.2g 26m R 95 30.2 2230:34 plasma
27602 dibl   20 0 75176 29m 9268 S  5 0.7 0:23.45 npviewer.bin
 6630 root   20 0 291m 99m 9m S  4 2.5 166:34.66 Xorg
 7029 dibl   20 0 299m 47m 18m S  3 1.2 65:08.32 compiz.real
12549 dibl   20 0 509m 62m 33m S  3 1.6 26:31.02 amarokapp
 7165 dibl   20 0 1573m 193m 18m S  2 4.9 151:23.45 java
 6975 dibl   20 0 176m 48m 8624 S  1 1.2 63:23.07 gkrellm
 6941 dibl   20 0 376m 32m 12m S  0 0.8 4:30.29 knotify4
  1 root   20 0 4016 888 600 S  0 0.0 0:00.60 init
  2 root   15 -5  0  0  0 S  0 0.0 0:00.00 kthreadd

Guess I'll reboot it -- that fixed it last time, but it seems to sneak up its resource usage over a period of days.

[MoonRise]

Re: Plasma frozen...requesting help major ASAP pronto!!!

I had that problem as well after leaving my system locked while at work. Killed Plasma and made things worse. I've also noticed that after that and doing a Ctrl-Alt-BckSpc, for some reason, KWIN doing something similar. Had to completely reboot to get back up. Glad that I'm not the only one on that one!

[dibl]

Re: Plasma frozen...requesting help major ASAP pronto!!!

Rebooting the system fixed it (again). I dunno if simply restarting the X server would do the trick. I might try that next time.