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Frequently on some of my Ubuntu 10.04 machines I have a strange problem.

Some program will act up or break and need to be killed. But top will be frozen. Even if you close your session and come back days later top will still show the status of root processes the moment before the program acted up.

Killing the offending (broken) processes will free up system resources again, and you can use the machine like normal. EXCEPT the top command will be indefinitely frozen in the old state: for days, even weeks, on end.

Restarting the computer fixes top, but that doesn't help me understand what is going on.

What causes this scenario where top freezes? Is there a more clever way of fixing it than just restarting the machine?

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I recommend reporting this as a bug. (This question also has some good information about bug reporting.) This will probably be closed as off-topic, in accordance with the FAQ and this policy. – Eliah Kagan Jan 10 at 19:37
Out of curiosity, where is a good place to go online for Ubuntu questions? I can't put them on StackOverflow or (now I know) AskUbuntu because they are off-topic. Certainly there must be somewhere to ask such questions of the experts. (Bug reports not really be much use if I am trying to learn something.) – theJollySin Jan 10 at 19:40
Bug reports, in order to be accepted, need to be reproducible using a well defined procedure. Here you are explicitly asking when top behaves like you describe. In other words, you are asking what you would be asked by a bug triager. So I think the question is perfectly legitimate, and I would avoid reporting it as a bug till you have more information about it. – Andrea Corbellini Jan 10 at 19:51
   
Mh... rethinking about the issue, only strace can provide helpful information. The problem is that strace produces way too output to be posted on Ask Ubuntu (which does not support attachments). Probably a bug report is better to handle the issue. :-) – Andrea Corbellini Jan 10 at 20:00
@EliahKagan: you are right. My intention was to try to "alleviate" the work of the bugsquad, since this issue is very vague and can be difficult to handle. – Andrea Corbellini Jan 10 at 20:04
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closed as off topic by Uri Herrera, Eliah Kagan, jrg♦ Jan 25 at 18:46

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