Public bug reported:
Any time that an application's resource usage gets out of control the
entire system starts to lock up eventually making it almost impossible
to kill the program.
First the mouse cursor starts to become jumpy, at this point if your
quick you can kill whatever is using the resources although sometimes it
takes as long as a minute for the click on the close button to be
received, some time later the cursor locks up completely and
applications stop responding, finally the entire system practically
freezes which makes it impossible to kill the process using all the
cpu/memory even trying to use ssh. The hdd does alot of work indicating
that the swap file is seeing heavy usage.
At this stage the only real option is to hit either ctrl+alt+backspace
or alt+sysrq+k to kill the x session and all the running apps and even
then it can take several minutes to receive the key press and kill
everything. Otherwise it needs a hard reboot.
I'm not sure if this its a problem with the kernel itself (specifically
the scheduler) or if perhaps the basic gui components such as xorg,
gnome and such should be running at a higher priority to ensure you can
still use it to kill things.
I think its more memory usage than cpu.
An example of this would be when using Inkscape, I grabbed a large 1.4mb
map of the world from wikicommons, selected everything and decided to
increase the stroke size to make the borders more obvious, I hit the up
arrow not realizing it was increasing it by a very large amount by
default. I tried to repeat the process however next few time the
application crashed or perhaps was killed by something designed to
prevent this however it did still cause unresponsiveness before it died.
This is not the only application that has cause problems though.
I have 1gb onboard memory and 1gb swap. Obviously you can only do so
much with finite resources but a rouge process should only cause
problems for itself not the entire system including services like sshd.
** Affects: ubuntu-meta (Ubuntu)
Importance: Undecided
Status: New
--
Ubuntu interface becomes unresponsive underheavy load
https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/289892
You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu
Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu.
--
ubuntu-bugs mailing list
ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
