Re: Gnome freezes in FC6

[Keith Lofstrom <keithl kl-ic com>]

On Tue, Jul 31, 2007 at 10:46:13AM -0400, Van wrote:
> I REALLY need some kind of solution to this but I guess no one has more 
> of a clue than I do. Since at least Sean Dynan has a similar problem, I 
> present this further idea in hope that this may help more than just me 
> (or stimulate a better idea in someone else).

I've seen some Gnome freezes too, with the 2.16 that comes with 
the RHEL5 clone (Scientific Linux) that I run.  Most annoying.

It may be memory related.  Firefox is a likely culprit;  like most
browsers, Firefox caches quite a bit of data.  That cache can be
cleared, most easily by restarting Firefox.  However, Flash animations
(youtube, banner ads, etc.) also squirrel away data in memory 
associated with the X server, and some of that doesn't seem to get
released after Firefox is stopped.  Over time, the memory associated
with X just keeps creeping upwards, and is only reset by logging out.

And it may be related to something else.  I see excessive restore
failures after suspending my laptop (about once every 5 days) and
that may be another symptom of something going on.  This happens
less often if I am diligent about logout/login every day or so. 
However, those are kernel panics (no response to ping, much less
ssh), so this could be an entirely different problem.

What irks me is that there is apparently no instrumentation or
debugging for these behaviors.  I have access to better tools for
probing submicron transistors running at 10GHz under 8 layers of
metal than I have for debugging linux on my own laptop.  That is
very wrong.

Keith

-- 
Keith Lofstrom          keithl keithl com         Voice (503)-520-1993
KLIC --- Keith Lofstrom Integrated Circuits --- "Your Ideas in Silicon"
Design Contracting in Bipolar and CMOS - Analog, Digital, and Scan ICs