Desktop freezing when I/O activity is high

Hi,

I’ve been encountering some freezing issues when my system has high I/O activity (specifically writing to disks). Whenever my scheduled rsync copies over backups or Steam installs a large game, my desktop freezes but I am still able to stuff like pause/play my music using my keyboard buttons. To temporarily fix the issue, I switch to TTY and back (ctrl+alt+f7 and ctrl+alt+f1) but sometimes this doesn’t work an I get stuck on a black screen. When I get stuck, I always have to do a reboot to get back.

The “desktop freezing” leads me to believe that this is a GPU issue but I’m not sure how to test if it is or find errors that may be logged from it.

My specs are:
Operating System: Manjaro Linux
KDE Plasma Version: 5.20.3
KDE Frameworks Version: 5.76.0
Qt Version: 5.15.2
Kernel Version: 5.9.11-3-MANJARO
OS Type: 64-bit
Processors: 8 × Intel® Core™ i7-6700K CPU @ 4.00GHz
Memory: 15.6 GiB of RAM
Graphics Processor: GeForce GTX 1080 Ti/PCIe/SSE2
Graphics Driver: Nvidia 455.45.01

Any suggestions are appreciated. Thank so much.

Cant say what can be causing the freezes,but you can tweak a little bit the system to fight the high I/O in the disk,download this small script and execute it.in there you can apply all the settings and then restart the pc.

Please read this:

and post some more information so we can see what’s really going on. Now we know the symptom of the disease, but we need some more probing to know where the origin lies…

  1. An inxi --admin --verbosity=7 --filter --no-host --width would be the minimum required information… (Personally Identifiable Information like serial numbers and MAC addresses will be filtered out by the above command)
  2. In your particular case, an output of smartctl --all /dev/XdY where X and Y are the device letters for your HDD would be beneficial as well.

:+1:

P.S. If you enter a bit more details in your profile, we can also see which Desktop Environment you’re using, which CPU/GPU you have, …