10 Feb 2023, 01:03 by [email protected]: > I was trying to fill out a PDF form on Okular and my system started crawling > to halt on text fields until it locked up completely. SSD stayed solid on (so > God knows how many write cycles it gluttoned), fan went into overdrive trying > to keep the circuitry from frying, and the computer completely froze. I > couldn't even SSH in to shut down programs because my frozen computer > couldn't spare any resources to authenticate remote access. The only log > entries indicating that something was amiss was: > > boinc[1409]: 10-Feb-2023 00:22:44 [---] Suspending computation - CPU is busy > boinc[1409]: 10-Feb-2023 00:22:57 [---] Resuming computation > > Followed by a 10-minute gap in all logs until I hard-rebooted the system. > > So unless I missed something in one of the logs, there's nothing anyone can > do about this other than note for posterity that KDE and Linux still have > systemic design flaws. Rogue apps can still cripple the system without > leaving any evidence whatsoever of what went wrong. And until it leaves > evidence, there's no way to identify the bugs. Just frustrated users and lost > data when you can't save what you're working on. > > Maybe a doctoral student is working on these design issues so this doesn't > happen. If not, there should be. > > Vent over. Thank you for reading. > Supplemental to rant, which may be more productive.
There's a grave problem with how Okular processes PDF forms. Simple, short-answer text entry has ballooned a simple 1 MB file into a 1.2 GB file. This would explain (but not excuse) the excessive CPU and hard-drive usage. It probably also maxed out the RAM and caused the system to freeze. Workaround: avoid using Okular to complete PDF forms at all costs!!!
