synaptic acting weirdly after upgrade from 16.04 to 18.04
 

Hello,

I upgraded the to the LTS version from the older version. The 16.04 was working perfectly and i upgraded it to 18.04 thinking the new one would also be like that but ...

I am posting this to solve a unique problem i am facing on my pc.

on firing up synaptic some random service or program be it panel or xorg or firefox or just about any some random BUNCH of software(s) starts to consume more cpu than they would normally alongwith synaptic and there are a lot of pauses for me and and the system behaves very very sluggishly. I have AMD atholon x2 4 core processor alongwith 8gb ram. Linux doesn't normally behave like this to me ;).

I have another laptop also dell which came pre-installed with 16.04 and i upgraded it also LTS. Though there were some problems i faced with the not so useful snapd service but i managed to get it to work as per requirement. I also had 16.04 installed to pen-drive which also like laptop behaved after some time.

I am unable to pinpoint the cause of this synaptic consuming my CPU resource problem. If i let it run for 2-3 minutes the synaptic interface font changes to boxes and any installation or maintenance work being run would go kaput!!!

I tried searching solution online to no avail. Though i tried some font-issue or xorg issue solutions which i though might be the reason. But i wasn't the case. The most amusing thing is that on firing up synaptic 4 or 5 other process start consuming cpu and when i stop it everything goes back to normal.

I am also worried that it is only affecting my pc. i know i can simply format and reinstall. but i haven't done it since 16.04 was last installed about 3-4 years back and would like to maintain the record. And also i have grown fond of synaptic since i started on Debian a decade or so back.

Any help to track the problem would be most helpful and if solution is also provided i would be very very happy.

Thanks and with best regards

CMG

How much freespace is there on your / filesystem? On /home/?

If ample, I suspect some of what the thread beginning at https://lists.debian.org/debian-user.../msg00103.html discusses (Synaptic retirement due to incompatibility with Wayland) may be bleeding into 18.04. Does similar trouble manifest if you open some kind of desktop session other than Gnome? XFCE? IceWM? Cinnamon? LXQt? Plasma? My only 18.04 installation is running TDE.

I have atlest 40-50 gigs free space on the partition ext4 and i think it is more than enough.

Well i am running ubuntu studio and noticed that i am unable to run certain desktops like cinamon and lxqt kde where it reverts back to login screen after trying to login. i am thinking that its an issue with gdx xdm kdm ldm etc or one of its neighbours not being installed. As it is i am perfectly happy with xfce running on my system. I have noticed the synaptic drop you mentioned in buster, but i think it is back here

https://tracker.debian.org/pkg/synaptic

Was introduced to linux in 2004 with suse, found out debian, settled with ubuntu, enjoying xfce what more to say.

If synaptic is being dropped i say it is very sad. Maybe problems like that being faced by me might be reason. And i don't seem to find a good replacement for it. The best feature is browsable list and search with installed / unistalled/ automatic fixation of broken etc. you see just like a pro noob would like it. I am afraid there is no suitable replacement also for it.

I can use apt but would be big heartbreak if i have to let go synaptic.

Coming back to the problem is there any chance to find out why other process should increase the cpu utilisation when i start synaptic.


Thanks

could it be a graphical issue...
output of please.

One more thing i noticed that if firefox is running at the time of running synaptic, the system completely becomes unresponsive for atleast 20-30 seconds and thereafter behaves very sluggishly due to high(99%) cpu utilisation. Even after closing synaptic, the system continues high cpu usage until i close firefox. Strange. That's the reason why i first suspected firefox, but then pinpointed it to synaptic.

no origin error is not dispayled if i again run the command. This error was showing up only from last two or three weeks and also it doesn't show up on retry at anytime after the first try.


I just yesterday only uninstalled the nvidia drivers and reverted to nouveau drivers.

Thanks for looking into it.

did you reboot since then?
the Xorg.0.log seems to think you're using nvidia, but the lspci output says nouveau :scratch:

please reboot, look at Xorg.0.log again, if it's different, post it again.
also `ls -al ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log`
look at the entries marked (EE) - there's a lot of weird stuff. is your system currently usable?

your update looks ok, except for this: https://packagecloud.io/AtomEditor/atom/any any InRelease - is this a regular ubuntu ppa? are you still using atom editor?

can you also look at logs when the problematic behaviour occurs.
in addition to what we have here, there's also

There is no "the" nouveau. lspci reports only the in use kernel nouveau, not the DDX. Xorg.0.log reports only the DDX in use. There is a kernel nouveau, which FOSS DDX drivers depend on, and there is a nouveau DDX provided by the FOSS package xserver-xorg-video-nouveau. If you wish a single report that reports both the kernel video driver and the DDX driver, use a non-ancient version of inxi -G[xx] from within an X session.

I uninstalled nvidia using the following link

https://askubuntu.com/questions/2062...ver-completely

The problem was there even before i did that and yes i switched off and on many times after i had removed the driver and am posting through it and it seems ok other than a slow frame rate for the "this war of mine" which i fixed with smaller in game resolution.

the above puzzled me also but thought that being nvidia hardware it might be popping up. If u say that it shouldn't then it might be a problem.

yes i installed atom through their repo and am using it.

dmesg
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1sYk...ew?usp=sharing

journalctl -b
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1Zku...ew?usp=sharing

I agree 18.04 is acting pretty weird for me but still running steam games, net surfing and pretty much what ever i expect it to do other than the stranger things that i have mentioned with synaptic. i could ignore all the other stuff not affecting my daily routine, but when synaptic starts acting wierdly although i use it hardly once a month, it gives me panic attack. I seem to loose control over my system, but then there is apt-get, but you kinda of don't feel the godlike feeling you get with synaptic. :)

After reboot i don't see much change.


`ls -al ~/.local/share/xorg/Xorg.0.log`
Since you mentioned it i tell you that since i upgraded my LTS many weird things are going on in this pc. like it sometimes hangs after cold boot. And sometimes it freezes after login. But all this goes away if i restart once or twice. Since it is dual boot with win 7 which i hardly use nowadays on this pc, i have never noticed this behaviour on win 7.

Now i will post syslog details after i start synaptic and for that i have close this browser as it continues to utilize 99% of cpu even after closing synaptic which is not the case with other apps.

I started it at 20:59 and then synaptic started its usual cpu consumption cycle which I abruptly ended by closing it with many clicks on x.

Hope any of the above is helpful in identifying the problem/solution.

I didn't get that.

In 18.04, inxi is an ancient 2.3.56 version. Current is 3.0.33.

that is way too old, so it's the wrong file.
strange, I thought the change to putting logs in $HOME was fairly recent.
anyhow:
hum.
does not really sound like a synaptic issue.
are you 100% sure that synaptic is the only application acting up?

next time you get the strange behaviour, instead of rebooting, try switching tty's with Ctrl-Alt-F2, log in, enter `top`and see what is eating resources.
also perform something like this:
these files should still be present after a reboot so you can post them too.

I cannot look at these files. a rar'd text file on google drive? weird. please use a normal pastebin, e.g. http://paste.debian.net/

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log
http://paste.debian.net/1078998/

Well when it hangs it hangs. no keyboard or mouse functioning.

dmesg
http://paste.debian.net/1079002/

journalctl -b gives 2mb file so how do i share it.

i am woriking on getting a screen shot of top when i run synaptic....

Another strange issue with Ubuntu while we are discussing the bugs, my system suddenly hangs while viewing youtube, or some audio app, or something i cannot pinpoint on but youtube i have noticed, because... i was watching video, took my eyes of screen for a second and sound was there but everything hanged on screen no let up or shakiness in audio. mouse and keyboard both hanged with the screen. Now i don't want take your attention from the main problem of synaptic, but since we are discussing x problems also as a cause for it i thought of mentioning it too.

that paste is gone now :(

yep, that's the correct file, as you can see from the timestamp. it's current.


in that case dmesg probably won't be much help, but looking at your paste:
http://paste.debian.net/1079002/
apparently nouveau (the driver for your nvidia) would prefer to get some firmware:
i don't know.
you could try looking at it, you should be getting better at these things now.
it would be nice to get a look at it.
but since you have to reboot after a freeze, we should really be looking at the last journal, so try this instead:

Thanks for all the help. unfortunately i couldn't pinpoint the problem and ended up reinstalling ubuntu and thats it everything ok.

Thanks for letting us know, cmgeo.