System monitoring apps sometimes fail to load

Support and Help
1

Ubuntu Support Template

Ubuntu Version:
24.04

Desktop Environment:
Example: KDE Plasma

Problem Description:
Hello! I have been using Kubuntu for some time and it is excellent.

However, I have occasionally run into a strange issue. This also occurred on Linux Mint, as I previously used that OS as well. Most recently, I was using Kdenlive and it was rather slow and I wanted to check the System Monitor. Sometimes, I will try to open the plasma System Monitor, and it will load infinitely. The application is unresponsive and must be terminated to close the window. Mission Center also fails with the message “Failed to connect to Gatherer socket”. I also attempted to run the command “systemctl status” but the command times out.

Besides these, the system behaves normally and there are no other issues. I can restart the computer to make the issue go away, but I would like to prevent it from happening to begin with. The most frustrating bit is that I’m not even sure what causes this. Does anyone know why this might happen? Here is a video of the issue: https://zip.macver.org/u/97C2Oo.mp4

Relevant System Information:
Operating System: Kubuntu 24.04
KDE Plasma Version: 5.27.12
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.115.0
Qt Version: 5.15.13
Kernel Version: 6.14.0-33-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: X11
Processors: 24 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-13700K
Memory: 78.3 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: NVIDIA GeForce RTX 4070 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Manufacturer: Gigabyte Technology Co., Ltd.
Product Name: B660M DS3H DDR4

Screenshots or Error Messages:
I have a video attached in the “Problem Description” section.

What I’ve Tried:
Restarting the computer fixes the issue.

Thank you!

2

Next time this happens, please:

  • Restart the computer to temporarily fix the issue
  • Please post output from running ls -lah /var/log/journal/* (One of these directories will be named the same as the value from cat /etc/machine-id. You can either obscure that particular ID in a way that makes clear it’s your machine-id, or if you choose not to obscure it you can additionally post the output of cat /etc/machine-id. Up to you.)
  • Before the issue occurs again, try to run journalctl -b -1 to view systemd journal messages from the previous boot where the issue occurred. Does this command work? If so, please page through the output, do you see any related messages between when it was OK and when the issue occurred, or a particularly large amount of messages?

If you are not even able to run journalctl -b then I would recommend backing up any important data you have on that system, because in that case there is a significant chance you might be best off doing a complete clean reinstall of Kubuntu.