ld_linux.so.2 and Xorg SLOWDOWN

[Ray.Holme]

Every few days, I login to a machine that is running slower than a dog uphill against molasses.

When I view what is going on with "top", I find that the cpu resources are split almost evenly between ld_linux.so.2 and Xorg (100% between them). The only things I have in my toolbar (inactive) are shell-tools and firefox. The only thing open is Evolution.

I am running a fully patched fedora 12, but I have seen similar behaviour when I was running fedora 8. I have seen other postings on ubunto (you be one too?) for a system using Adobe acrobat to read PDFs. I suspect the problem has little to do with any of the applications but something is looping in the shared library code.

Is there any way to capture more information on this so the problem can be logged and possibly fixed?

I should add that this is a twin cpu system as that may be part of the problem. Bot Xorg and ld_linux are taking over 53-55% of a single cpu, firefox is taking 10%, ....

[Rubberman]

What distribution, kernel, and xorg versions are you running? Also, ld_linux.so.2 is usually a link, so please post the output of "ls -l /lib/ld*" here.

Update: oops - I see you are running FC12, fully patched. Missed that... Still, kernel and xorg versions + file listing requested would be nice.

[Ray.Holme]

ls -l /lib/ld*
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 143412 2010-05-20 09:54 /lib/ld-2.11.2.so
lrwxrwxrwx. 1 root root 12 2010-06-04 14:21 /lib/ld-linux.so.2 -> ld-2.11.2.so

ls -l /boot/...
-rwxr-xr-x. 1 root root 3609696 2010-09-15 12:16 vmlinuz-2.6.32.21-168.fc12.x86_64

ls -l /usr/bin/Xorg
-rws--x--x. 1 root root 1940432 2010-04-16 03:09 /usr/bin/Xorg

the latter is not much use - sorry

BUT as I said before this behaviour has been around for a while.

I saw it in fedora8 and it is still here in 12.

[Rubberman]

Sorry, but I was just fishin' - no clue really why this is going on. The only time I had a similar problem was due to my nVidia driver, which they eventually fixed. What video hardware/driver are you using?

[Ray.Holme]

I had a webcam attached for my logitech using fedore 8 - have not tried to connect it up again as skype on Linux does not yet support a webcam.

I believe my standard video driver is nVidia too, but I have forgotten how to get details. I believe the "loop" being entered has more to do with firefox and the windowing system, but will be darned if I really know. My other suspicion that many are NOT seeing this is the twin cpuS which may not be so common.

Thanks for your thoughts, but I guess I will just have to live with this. What I was hoping for was some way to take a core dump of all running stuff and send it to someone who knows how to read such things.

Restarting the computer is the only sure solution now, but the problem does go away if I leave it alone and come back. In other words, the infinite loop is finite.

[Rubberman]

I use a webcam on Ubuntu w/ skype all the time. Why do you say that skype on Linux doesn't support them? It also works on my CentOS system (older kernel).

Also, the non-infinite loop behavior was a characteristic of the older nVidia driver and it was definitely related to Firefox as well. I am currently running a recent driver (256.35 - latest is 256.53) and it no longer shows that behavior. In fact, drivers until last winter had this problem and after a LOT of complaining (I even made personal contact with one of their engineers in that process - not easy to do w/ nVidia) it was resolved, though I forget exactly which driver version resolved it. At least it hasn't regressed since then...

[Ray.Holme]

Well, this thread has taken a turn. Not a bad one, but strange. I have skype 2.1.,,,, beta for Linux installed and use fedora. I also installed a web camera sometime back and it worked better here than on the PC which I keep around for access to the MS world (sick I know). I could not get the camera to work with Skype and got the impression from comments at the time (a year or so ago) that this was not going to happen. Since Skype has not done a newer release than what I appear to be running, I have not tried.

Perhaps it is fedora or perhaps that I have not tried hard enough. Although labeled a green horn, that may be a wrong handle for me. I have been using Unix since 1990 and have even done some kernel code (not much). Before that I used many other OSs but would never dream of going back.

So if you can point me at a place where I can see how to get the camera (logitech) working, I will do that. I guess there is no way to fix the original problem of this thread so I will just live with slow once in a while or reboot. Thanks.

[Rubberman]

Well, with Ubuntu I just plugged it in (external USB webcam) and it worked. I went to the options menu on skype and tested it first - no problem at all. I think most internal cameras are also usb devices (internally connected). If you can determine the make/model/id of the device (lsusb or lspci) then if you still are having problems, look at this web site for drivers and configuration information: http://mxhaard.free.fr/spca5xx.html