22.04 reproducable Xorg freeze

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1

My system is running Ubuntu 22.04.5, using the 5.15 LTS kernel.

Xorg freezes every now and then, usually for 1-5 seconds.

I found a way to reproduce it:

  1. Install the package ‘imagemagick’
  2. now start this in another terminal: while true; do import -window root /dev/shm/tmp.jpg; sleep 1; done
  3. Quickly navigate between different windows, a lag should be noticeable

Alternatively, the following completely freezes xorg for me:
strace import -window root /dev/shm/bug.jpg

However, this works fine / only a short freeze occurs:
strace -o /tmp/strace.log import -window root /dev/shm/bug.jpg

The computer has an AMD processor. This issue occurred on both NVIDIA and AMD GPUs.

This does NOT occur on Fedora 37, 39, 41

dmesg does not show anything, neither does journalctl.

I tested it on the 5.15.5 desktop live system, which uses the 6.8 kernel - It didn’t happen there.
Am planning to try an older 5.15.1 desktop live system that has kernel 5.15 too.

Note: Thy system got installed via the 5.15.5 server image, and installed xorg etc. afterward. Maybe some package/library is missing?

Anyone has an idea what I could do to troubleshoot this?

2

Are you using Konsole?
If so, is it particularly affected by lag (e.g. unresponsive for large time)?

3

I don’t use it. I just installed it to test it, and it seemed to behave normally.

4

Ah… I asked because I notice such lags you describe after some system uptime, when desktop is full… and it is actually 5 desktops with each 16 screens… lags occur from about 20, 30 windows upward. It is the same on Debian. On FreeBSD there is no such lag.
On Konsole the lag is particularly painful, sometimes dozens of seconds. On rxvt there is only a fraction of a second delay, if any noticeable.
Thus I think it might be connected to something that is used a lot by Konsole…

5

What you describe could be a memory / swap issue?

For me, it doesn’t happen on Debian, only on Ubuntu.

6

Ok I think I found something… When using /usr/bin/import from graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat, the freezes happen. When using imagemagick instead, it is not freezing. So it looks like there is a bug in graphicsmagick or graphicsmagick-imagemagick-compat. I guess the “random freezes” happened when some utility from graphicsmagick were used in the background. If the issue still persists, I will update this thread. On debian/fedora, I am/was probably just using imagemagick instead of graphicsmagick.

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