Freezes

[D3SK3R]

It looks like #683 I have been trying to figure out what's happening for some time now, looking at that post, I saw the command "bspc subscribe --fifo". It's been freezing randomly for weeks now almost every day, but it reliably freezes when I run that command, and it unfreezes when I cat or tail the file it points me too (/run/user/1000/bspwm_fifo.). Because of this behavior, I believe it's not something external, but a bspwm thing.

[zjeffer]

See #1318. Do you also use polybar with the player-mpris-tail module?

[D3SK3R]

See #1318. Do you also use polybar with the player-mpris-tail module?

forgot to mention that issue, no I don't use this module, and during one freeze I killed polybar to see if that was the case, but no

[zjeffer]

Do bspc commands also never execute when it's frozen? If you open something like htop, are bspc processes piling up?

[D3SK3R]

Do bspc commands also never execute when it's frozen? If you open something like htop, are bspc processes piling up?

not sure what you mean by piling up, but when I try to execute a bspc command, it just never responds

[zjeffer]

Yeah that's what I mean: in my case, focus-follows-pointer is enabled, meaning it will execute a bspc command every time I move my cursor over another window (to put that new window in focus). Every one of those commands never respond, resulting in a big list of bspc commands never getting executed. This list of processes is easy to see in htop, that's what I mean by piling up.

[D3SK3R]

Yeah that's what I mean: in my case, focus-follows-pointer is enabled, meaning it will execute a bspc command every time I move my cursor over another window (to put that new window in focus). Every one of those commands never respond, resulting in a big list of bspc commands never getting executed. This list of processes is easy to see in htop, that's what I mean by piling up.

ye it just happened again, and running ps aux | grep bspc from the tty, it shows way too many bspc commands

I just spent 30 minutes inside the tty trying stuff to unfreeze bspwm, killing basically all processes one by one to see if I find a faulty one, but nothing, it's getting more and more frustrating

[zjeffer]

It's strange because I had the same issue last year almost every day, but I haven't experienced the problem for months now.

What does lsof -p$(pgrep -x bspwm) output? Try the command once it freezes, and compare it to the output when it's running normally.

[D3SK3R]

It's strange because I had the same issue last year almost every day, but I haven't experienced the problem for months now.

What does lsof -p$(pgrep -x bspwm) output? Try the command once it freezes, and compare it to the output when it's running normally.

It stopped here too, no idea why is it, but for the last 5 days, I haven't experienced a freeze, while it used to happen every day, and NOTHING changed on my system

[D3SK3R]

It's strange because I had the same issue last year almost every day, but I haven't experienced the problem for months now.

What does lsof -p$(pgrep -x bspwm) output? Try the command once it freezes, and compare it to the output when it's running normally.

well well, It just happened again, one more freaking freeze. And the output to that command looked exactly like when it's working normally

[vaygr]

Seems like I've just faced this freeze myself. But thanks I looked at this issue earlier, I knew what to look for. My "uptime" was several days though.

So it's interesting.. In my case it seems it was triggered by a new state of the script module (once I got a new notification on GitHub):

#!/bin/sh

if [ x"$1" == x"corp" ]; then
  location_url="https://corp.domain.tld/api/v3/notifications"
  access_token=`cat ~/.config/github/polybar.corp.token`
else
  location_url="https://api.github.com/notifications"
  access_token=`cat ~/.config/github/polybar.token`
fi

page=1
count=0

while [ $page -gt 0 ]; do
  count_p=$count
  count_c=$(curl -s -m 10 --retry 3 -H "Authorization: token ${access_token}" "${location_url}?page=${page}" | jq -r 'if length == 0 then 0 else [.[] | select(.unread == true)] | length end' 2> /dev/null)

  if [ -z "$count_c" ]; then
    echo "N/A"

    break
  fi

  let count=count+count_c

  if [ $count_p -eq $count ]; then
    page=0

    if [ $count -eq 0 ]; then
      echo "$count"
    else
      if [ x"$1" == x"corp" ]; then
        color="#bd2c40"
      else
        color="#55aa55"
      fi

      echo "%{F${color}}$count%{F-}"
    fi
  else
    let page++
  fi
done

but, similarly to #1318, killing polybar didn't help, and what did was killing this script still running from another polybar script module:

#!/bin/sh

STATE="$(dirname $0)/.nd.state"

state() {
  if [ ! -f "${STATE}" ]; then
    echo "%{F#555}%{F-} active"
  else
    echo "%{F#bd2c40}%{F-} paused"
  fi
}

toggle() {
  if [ -f "${STATE}" ]; then
    pkill -USR2 -x dunst && rm "${STATE}" && notify-send "...dunst resumed"
  else
    notify-send -t 1000 "pausing dunst..." && sleep 1 && pkill -USR1 -x dunst && touch "${STATE}"
  fi

  exit 0
}

trap "toggle" USR1

while :; do
  state
  sleep 1 &
  wait
done

I wonder if @patrick96 has any ideas on what might be the cause and how to debug this better.

[vaygr]

cc @baskerville @emanuele6

[D3SK3R]

Well... It happened again. Just bought a new laptop, installed Arco Linux, then bspwm, started setting everything up and then freeze... But this time I could reproduce the freeze by running update-grub, everytime I run it, the window manager freezes, but it's not limited to it, some times it freezes out of nowhere, like before... I have bspwm and kde installed, this grub freeze only happens on bspwm, I can run update-grub, grub customizer, and everything works fine under kde. (The freezes start by making my unable control the window manager, my mouse stops focusing new windows, I cant spawn or kill any window, but can still move my mouse and type into the window that was focused before the freeze, I can even spawn windows that's not managed, like rofi, but after like 30 seconds, it completely freezes, I can't even move the mouse or enter a tty)

[zjeffer]

@D3SK3R Can you include some logs?

[D3SK3R]

@D3SK3R Can you include some logs?

After some hours of trying different stuff, I found out that the problem was actually the nvidia driver, using the normal 'nvidia', it would freeze every time I tried to change something in grub, it stopped happening when I changed to nvidia-dkms. So we are back to the old freezes, bspwm still freezes out of nowhere, apparently randomly.

[ACR-Jeff]

I have been having similar issues on void linux running a fresh install of bspwm, with polybar. My pulseaudio isn't even setup yet, I noticed it freezes often when right mouse clicking windows to get the context menu etc, Some times it comes out of it, Other times I have to restart my system to get out of it.

[ACR-Jeff]

I went back and restored a timeshift backup, Then I used eww's example bar, No freezes so far, Originally I was trying bspwm with polybar, Appears something within the configuration or polybar in general was the issue.