[Ifeffit] Athena Freezing Desktop

[Matt Newville]

David,

I suspect that you *should* get sensible error messages from Athena
about running out of Ifeffit resources well before seeing a crash of
X.   Not in the sense of "Bruce ought to change Athena to report
this", but in the sense of "Bruce already does report this".
Generally, Ifeffit/Athena should run out of memory well before a Linux
system runs out of memory and swap space.    Crashing X over ssh seems
really peculiar to me -- that's not an out-of-memory issue.   I don't
often leave Athena open for hours at a time on Linux, but have never
seen such crashes on Ubuntu.  My suspicion is that this might be
caused by Perl/Tk,  X, or the lengthy ssh session.

--Matt



On Mon, Feb 15, 2010 at 1:28 PM, David Ehle <ehle at agni.phys.iit.edu> wrote:
>
> 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 at iit.edu with any responses as I'm not an active subscriber to
> this list.
>
> David Ehle
> MRCAT -IIT
> _______________________________________________
> Ifeffit mailing list
> Ifeffit at millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov
> http://millenia.cars.aps.anl.gov/mailman/listinfo/ifeffit
>
>