lubuntu-desktop team mailing list archive

[Jared Norris <jrnorris@xxxxxxxxx>]

> How often is "every now and then"?  Once a day?  Once a month? :)  If it
> is very infrequent, you will probably need to run monitoring tools all
> the time, so you can "catch it in the act".
>

The computer is on 24/7 but I'm obviously not at it, so for example
today it has done it 3 times while I'm at the computer already in the
space of a few hours. Other days it's not at all.

> (1) Based on the above, I would suggest running system monitoring tools
> to check what else the machine is doing when it is lagging your
> keyboard/mouse input.  htop, iotop, jnettop will do for simple
> text-based "what is doing a lot of work on my PC" checking. vmstat and
> iostat might be worth a look too.

I completely forgot about iotop, I've been running htop and can't see
anything, the CPU is idling along at 1 - 3 % (3.2 P4 Prescott) and the
RAM is using around 20% (2GB). Last time I had a really weird problem
with a computer it turned out to be a faulty CPU cooler connection so
I've been keeping an eye to the temps and they are all fine.


> (2) If you are comfortable working at the command line, you could also
> consider running the machine with no GUI (no X) -- no LXDE stuff at all,
> just plain old text mode consoles) for a while.  If the issue goes away,
> you would then suspect that whatever is causing the problem is X related
> in some way.  With enough time, you could then start X and run just an
> xterm or LXterminal window and see if that lags or not... and so on...
> slowly building back up towards a full LXDE GUI.  Knowing what was added
> that started the problem up again would be a very big clue.

Ah I was hoping this would have been tested with the SSH because this
is my main IRC, IM, Web Browsing and Email machine here at home.

> (3) If you have another spare test machine, try setting it up as close
> to identical to the first one as you can, documenting how to do that
> step by step.  Then, see if you can reproduce the problem on the second
> machine too.  If you can reproduce it there, you now have accurate and
> tested step-by-step "how to reproduce" information for the bug report,
> which could be very handy for others trying to duplicate and track down
> the issue :)
> Realistically, this kind of "weird stuff happens occasionally" issue is
> going to be hard to track down.  Hopefully the above suggestions will
> help, if you decide you have the patience to really work on doing that.

Thanks for your thoughts I have already started up iotop so I'll see
how that goes. I was half hoping there would be a "oh I had that
problem and did this" solution, but I think that was a bit of wishful
thinking. I will make sure I let everyone know if I find a solution
though as this is really odd. Feel free to keep the suggestions
coming, it's really bugging me.


Regards,

Jared Norris JP(Qual) BBehSc(Psych)
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/JaredNorris