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Problem:
Computer becomes unresponsive tothe mouse and keyboard on an intermittant basis.
Details:
About 5 to 15 % of the time the computer is unresponsive to the mouse and keyboard. Regardless of what application is currently being used or is open but not in active use, the computer will not respond to input for a period of time. The keystrokes or mouse clicks and movments are being stored up but there is no response until whatever is taking up the computer's resources gets through. Sometimes these excursions are short just 1 to 5 seconds, other times longer. Sometimes there is a period of unresponsiveness with interspersed bursts of responsiveness.
For example,during such a period 20 to 50 characters might be typed but rather than appearing on the screen as the keys are struck there will be a pause and suddenly 5 will appear then another pause and 10 will appear, etc.. Then, when the episode of unresponsiveness is over, the computer will go back to displaying characters as they are typed.
Movement of the cursor on the screen either by key stroke or mouse movement or clicks gets really confusing.
It appears fairly obvious that the cpu is intermittantly busy with some other task that has higher priority than the keyboard or mouse.
It appears that the problem exists regardless of which (if any) applications are running.
The help that is needed.
For diagnostic purposes, it would be nice to have something like the MS Windows Task Manager ability to monitor all current processes in real time so I could see what the offending process was. If Ubuntu has such a feature I am unaware of it and how to access it.
If there is a simple way to increase the priority of the mouse and keyboard, I am not aware of how that is done.
Other Details:
-- The problem seems to equally affect the keyboard, the mouse pad and the USB mouse.
-- The USB mouse is a microsoft wheel mouse.
-- Disconnecting the USB mouse has not effect on the problem.
-- The degree to which the problem manifests is substantially variable sometimes going long periods between episodes and other times interrupting my work every minute or so.
-- The computer is a Dell studio 1535 laptop obtained about 2 months ago
-- The computer did not do this when I first got it
-- The process of getting it to work with a USB modem seems to have been responsible for disabling both the sound and the wirless capabilities and there is known to be a problem with Modem drivers and Ubuntu but the exact nature of that problem and what to do about it is beyond me.
-- Dell's promised "ubuntu support" has proven worthless as they now claim it is only for "hardware issues" and they somehow reason that does not include driver issues (this is based on my experience with several utterly inadequate Dell support personnel).
Well that was a bust, I used the monitor and noting showed up as ursurping the computer's resources. I had to do it several times as the system monitor list always ran off the top or bottom of the screen, nevertheless, through several experiences of unresponsiveness I was able to watch what was using resources and nothing was taking more than a tiny percentage of capacity. Somehow whatever is casuing the problem is escaping the System Monitor's attention.
without the "| grep 1000" bit, I get all processes for all users, daemons included. Scrolling through this, I will see any unusual processes, especially from unusual users. For example, scrolling through mine, i found a user with UID 33, which I found unusual. Then I can run:
Code:
getent passwd | grep 33
which gives me:
Code:
www-data:x:33:33:www-data:/var/www:/bin/sh
which I turn out to be happy with, since www-data is the apache server daemon user, and I have an apache server running on this machine to serve a few test pages, so thats ok.
It's a laborious process, and no doubt someone has a better idea, but you may find that something like compiz or similar services / daemons are really killing your system, and you may need to change some settings to optimise your machine.
Come back if you need any help.
Last edited by irishbitte; 11-23-2008 at 10:01 AM.
Well the first help I am going to need is a brief tutorial on how to read this critter
Running the command ps axjf got me the following:
----------
$ ps axjf
PPID PID PGID SID TTY TPGID STAT UID TIME COMMAND
0 2 0 0 ? -1 S< 0 0:00 [kthreadd]
2 3 0 0 ? -1 S< 0 0:00 \_ [migration/0]
and something over 100 more lines as above.
(Sorry, but this forum software removes extra spaces so the columns don't line up )
----------
The first thing I would need to know is which column shows me what is taking up the most resources of the cpu, or is otherwise usurping the ability of the keyboard and mouse to respond. It would also be beneficial to know what all those column headers stand for. I realize that they are all mnemonics, but without even knowing what they stand for, I don't stand much of a chance of knowing what they are trying to tell me.
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