Slow or not responding desktop

[Gromm]

Hello all,

Something very annoying here. My desktop seems to be messed up. Icons and taskbars, the starter Icon etc do not respond when I click on them or respond very slow. It occured the past few days and I really need this solved because I
do various artwork for professional purposes on this machine. Strangely enough typing this message on the forum gives no problems so far. The buttons on a site, in this case this forum respond normally as well.

I tried a change of kernel, a change of Nvidia driver, with no result so far. What else could it be?

System specs: AMD Ryzen 9 / Nvidia RTX 3070 / 32GB ram.

[Snowhog]

Create a new user and log in with it. Does the problem persist? If it does not, then something in your regular user /home directory is (likely) at fault.

[Gromm]

Create a new user and log in with it. Does the problem persist? If it does not, then something in your regular user /home directory is (likely) at fault.

Ok, new user made, logged in with it and no problems with response of icons, lagging and so on. What kind of fault could be in the home-directory?

Update: the last two or three times I started up, I just waited for a few seconds...no problems. As soon as I press the starter-button or whatever a bit too early and the system starts to make fuss.

[Gromm]

For whoever this might read: as mysteriously as the problem came, as mysteriously it disappeared...

[Snowhog]

Linus Torvalds 'Third Law': "Any sufficiently advanced Operating System is indistinguishable from magic."

(Playfully adapted from science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, appearing in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.)

[Gromm]

Linus Torvalds 'Third Law': "Any sufficiently advanced Operating System is indistinguishable from magic."

(Playfully adapted from science fiction author Arthur C. Clarke's Third Law, appearing in his 1962 book Profiles of the Future: An Inquiry into the Limits of the Possible.)

Well, yesterday it happened again but it came together with the notification that my root partition only had 200mb left. I wonder how I could use up more than 80gb in a Kubuntu installation. I have the standard installation and some graphical stuff (inkscape, gimp, krita) and all the data etc is stored elsewhere. Usually it is more than enough so the rest can go to the Windows-partition (gaming takes some gb :P).

[Snowhog]

How many kernels do you have installed? Open a konsole and type: dpkg --list | grep -E -i 'linux-image|linux-headers'

[claydoh]

It might be worth looking at using Filelight to more quickly see what is taking up space.

It is not unknown for a rogue process or something to create large numbers of log files, or an ever-growing one. Kernel crash dumps are another thing.
If you really haven't installed much in the way of extra apps, even Flatpaks and Snaps would not use that much space.

If you are not using a separate /home partition, don't forget to peek there as well.

[Gromm]

How many kernels do you have installed? Open a konsole and type: dpkg --list | grep -E -i 'linux-image|linux-headers'

There where some installed. I looked into that already and removed all but the last two. That made some 1,5 gb free. Should be more than enough to install Filelight as Claydoh suggested. Thank you for the suggestion anyway, it as only a coincidence I discovered this option yesterday.

@Claydoh: Thank you for the suggestion. Will look into that soon.

[Gromm]

Well, well, well dear fellow members. I may or may not have found something, that depends on your response to this. The /log folder, located in /var contains 46,7 GB of data. What does it mean that my Log-folder takes so much space?
Can I delete log files just like that? I have a feeling I can't.

Update: to be more precise. A closer look made me discover my syslog file is 46gb size. What does that mean?

Might this Reddit post be a similar thing? https://www.reddit.com/r/Kubuntu/com...my_disk_space/

[oshunluvr]

Yes they can be deleted as the system will simply create a new one. However, a "normal" syslog is around 1-2 MB not GB. I suggest you start by see what exactly is spamming your syslog so often.

If it were my system, I would delete the syslog, reboot wait a minute or two, then open the log file and see what's there. If it's not already growing quickly, then do your normal activities and check the file size every few minutes until you discover what's causing the issue.

[Gromm]

Yes they can be deleted as the system will simply create a new one. However, a "normal" syslog is around 1-2 MB not GB. I suggest you start by see what exactly is spamming your syslog so often.

If it were my system, I would delete the syslog, reboot wait a minute or two, then open the log file and see what's there. If it's not already growing quickly, then do your normal activities and check the file size every few minutes until you discover what's causing the issue.

That is what I am going to do then. However, I already had the command tail -f /var/log/syslog running in the terminal and the notifications came really fast. Earlier today it was all about Firefox and apparmor denied snap or something, network manager etc etc, a lot of things. No idea how I ended up like this. Will post a few notifications here for who might know something.

[jlittle]

If the log files belong to systemd, IIUC that is if they are in /var/log/journal, the proper way to trim them is, in a konsole,

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

(The "100M" is arbitrary.) I just ran that on my desktop and 500 MB were freed. I wonder what process is meant to clear them; 500 MB seems excessive.

[Gromm]

If the log files belong to systemd, IIUC that is if they are in /var/log/journal, the proper way to trim them is, in a konsole,

sudo journalctl --vacuum-size=100M

(The "100M" is arbitrary.) I just ran that on my desktop and 500 MB were freed. I wonder what process is meant to clear them; 500 MB seems excessive.

Well, then I wonder how I ended up with a syslog of 46gb. It is emptied a few minutes ago but already the notifications are coming in with a vengeance :P. Among others, this is an example of what is spamming at the moment: audit: type=1400 audit(1768852386.463:341): apparmor="D
ENIED" operation="open" class="file" profile="snap.firefox.firefox" name="/proc/pressure/memory" pid=4441 comm
="MemoryPoller" requested_mask="r" denied_mask="r" fsuid=1000 ouid=0


This is not all however, more examples will follow if needed.

[Gromm]

Update: at this very moment the networkmanager is telling me a lot of things, which I do not understand of course. Anyway, the notifications keep on coming. Would be nice if someone could guide me somehow through a solution. Will restrict the journal for now to let's say 500 mb although that seems excessive according to John Little, but then I might have some more data to analyse.