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Several times over the last 48 hours I have had to reboot my way out of an XFCE4 hang where the mouse and keyboard cease responding in the GUI.

A pattern has emerged whereby this happens just after I have taken a screenshot using xfce4-screenshooter.

On @aquaherd's advice I found that sudo service lightdm restart did at least remove the need for a full reboot.

Is there any way I can fix this problem ?



Original Question

Several times over the last 24 hours I have had to reboot my way out of an XFCE4 hang where the mouse and keyboard cease responding in the GUI.

When this happens I am able to use ctrl-alt-f1 to get to TTY1 and I can login there by any attempt to bring xfce down (such as xfwm4 --replace, xfce4-session-logout or sudo service dbus restart) ultimately results in me having to issue a reboot command.

I've seen some indication that the hang might be dbus related (sorry I didn't take a specific note).

Also I think both of the latest problems have occurred within a few seconds of me taking a screenshot.

I would like suggestions on what I can do to pin the problem down and fix it.

Thanks

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  • On the console, using top to find out if an application consumes all CPU or memory, viewing ~/.xsession-errors, dmesg output and using sudo service lightdm restart as last measure comes to mind.
    – aquaherd
    Sep 1, 2014 at 7:51
  • thanks for the suggestions @aquaherd. Interestingly I had tried restarting lightdm but that achieved nothing. Anyway, I've written your suggestions down so next time it happens I've got something to start on.
    – LRE
    Sep 1, 2014 at 20:50

1 Answer 1

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This is fairly old, but I thought I'd reopen this, with a possible but report in the making.

I oversee a fairly large network on which we have many users who access a central LTSP server. Lately, we've noticed slowdowns and unintended log-offs when users take screenshots. Looking at top -0 %MEM, there are some xfce4-screenshooter processes taking fairly little CPU resources, but significant fractions of a TiB of memory (0.19) one process hit, which appear to hang as they acquire lots and lots of CPU time. I haven't reproduced the problem myself yet (hence no bug report), but I'm about to confirm and thought I'd reopen this as a prelude to an xfce bug report.

In answer to the question, if you are able to open a terminal window:

ps -ef | grep xfce

will give you the PID of the xfce4-screenshooter process, which you can then kill:

sudo kill <pid>

EDIT:

Looks like this was already solved.

Go to ~/.config/xfce4 and delete the xfce4-screenshooter file

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