Bruce,

Sorry for the accusatory subject line - I can't prove Athena is the culprit but I figured that others with the same problem would be searching for similar terms.

Running Athena from the current debian package for Lenny (2:1.2.11d-1) we have been seeing desktop freezes after some hard to characterize period of use. The time period seems to usually be a few hours, and there is a belief that it is connected to having more than a few raw data files open in Athena.

Users have previously seen Athena crash/freeze when they have "too many" files open, or Athena open for "too long" but I haven't been able to get any firm numbers.  The concern is that while previously when Athena crashed or froze, only Athena was effected. Now it seems that the whole desktop becomes non-responsive.

The reason I'm suggesting there is a link between Athena and the Desktop (XFCE4) problem is that if you connect to the system via SSH and kill Athena, the Desktop becomes unfrozen and the user can continue with what they are doing.

We have seen this occur on both beamlines, with different users and different data sets so I doubt it is data specific, but can send your some sample files if that will be useful.

In one case I was able to collect an error message from the
.xsession-errors file of a user who was experiencing the problem:
** (xfwm4:21854): WARNING **: Unmanaged net_wm_state (window 0x3800008)
X Error: BadWindow (invalid Window parameter) 3
 Major opcode:  7
 Minor opcode:  0
 Resource id:  0x329
kbuildsycoca running...
Reusing existing ksycoca
kbuildsycoca running...
Reusing existing ksycoca
kbuildsycoca running...
Reusing existing ksycoca
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 3891.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 4700.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 3891.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 4700.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 3891.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 4700.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 3891.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 4700.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 3891.
Use of uninitialized value in concatenation (.) or string at /usr/bin/athena line 4700.

I'm afraid I don't know if the lines before the lines that explicitly mention athena are related, or if these messages have anything to do with the desktop freezing problem - I think I have the seen the freeze without the errors.

Please advise if we can provide you with other information to make figuring out easier.

When this problem occurs at 3AM it really upsets our users (which tends to upset the staff when they get called about it...) so we have started running a second system just for Athena.  Can you make any suggestions on the minimum vs optimal hardware for Athena? For tracking many (30+) raw data files to see how a run is progressing, can you suggest minimum RAM, CPU power, # of Cores?

Thanks!!
Please CC ehle@iit.edu with any responses as I'm not an active subscriber to this list.

David Ehle
MRCAT -IIT
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