Can't use my system anymore. Performance problem, Usb not working and brave browser issues, VMWare

Ask Fedora
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1

It feels like I have a new issue every day, and I don’t even know where to start. Also I’m pretty new to Fedora and don’t know a lot about Linux in general, so please be kind to me.

First of all I want to start with the newest issue. Brave Browser isn’t starting any more. It worked a few minutes ago. I restarted my System because I had other issues performance wise and as soon as I wanted to get help here, it didn’t start anymore. Funny, isn’t it?

When I try to start it from Terminal it prompts me the following:

[9718:9718:1216/051537.960994:ERROR:process_singleton_posix.cc(358)] The profile appears to be in use by another Brave process (15422) on another computer (fedora-2.fritz.box). Brave has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Brave.
[9718:9718:1216/051537.961068:ERROR:message_box_dialog.cc(190)] Unable to show message box: Brave - The profile appears to be in use by another Brave process (15422) on another computer (fedora-2.fritz.box). Brave has locked the profile so that it doesn't get corrupted. If you are sure that no other processes are using this profile, you can unlock the profile and relaunch Brave.

Fritz Box is my router and I find that really spooky. Why is it doing that, and how can I solve the issue?

Next I’m not able to mount my Usb sticks and ssds. The problem appeared first after I tried to use Ventoy. It just mounted the partition which isn’t meant to be touched. I ignored it, as another usb stick worked just fine. But now no single usb device can be mounted anymore. I can mount it via terminal command though, but why does it fail via GUI? Also KDE still shows me, that it cannot be mounted, but it works just fine after the terminal command. It’s just really annoying, and its funny, that it works just better using a Windows Virtual Machine with VMWare.

Last but not least I’m coming to the biggest problem which makes my system nearly unusable. My Laptop got quiet hot ever since, but it feels like it gets worse with every update. It’s starting to get hot immediately after booting and the fans are always quiet loud. It was usable though. But since a few days it’s almost unusable due to the fact, that my touchpad lags like hell, but the trackpoint is still usable. Also I had a few complete freezes while using VMWare and Brave with a few tabs simultaniously, but also just by messing around with some Widgets in KDE. I thought about doing a fresh install, but I would be interested in what went wrong and frankly, I don’t wan’t to set everything up again. It was already kind of difficult for me to get VMWare running.

I played around quiet a bit with my system, and I don’t really know what I’m doing most of the time, but i find it kind of interesting to learn new stuff. The things I could think of are for example:
-I installed auto-cpufreq and I had the feeling, that it made the battery last longer, but it could also just be my imagination.
-I played around with linutil from a youtuber without knowing what I’m doing. Could it be possible, that I broke somthing there?
https://github.com/ChrisTitusTech/linutil
-Also it wasn’t really easy to get auto-login
-Installed Klassy WM-theme
-probably some other things I forgot now

If I can’t get rid of my performance issues, I’ll probably give Open Suse a shot, their Slowroll thing looks interesting. (Is it wise to write that here? oO) My Problem is that I really like Fedora so far, but the touchpad issue is driving me crazy and is probably the last straw that breaks the camels back. The Issue just disapeared the last few times, but seems to persist now, even after a few reboots.

Oh and here are my Specs:
(Would have pasted the output of the fpaste --sysinfo --printonly command but there is a limitation, so it doesn’t fit here anymore. Do you need that?
In short:
12 × AMD Ryzen 5 PRO 5675U with Radeon Graphics
14.4 GiB of Ram
Lenovo Thinkpad L13 Yoga Gen 3

Fedora 41 (updated from Fedora 40)
KDE Plasma 6.2.4
KDE Frameworks 6.8.0
Qt 6.8.1
Kernel 6.11.11-300.fc41.x86_64 (64-bit)
Wayland

Let me know if you need more Information.

3

I can’t answer all questions but to start:

Probably brave does an inverse lookup of the IP address of your system on the router, and gets “fedora-2.fritz.box”. Is your hostname really fedora-2 or only fedora and has the fritzbox a counter numbering uncleanly closed systems? (my ISP router does). Apparently, brave is not shutdown properly and thinks another instance is using the profile. So this is not really spooky. I do not know brave, so I do not know where the profile info is stored. May be brave provides supporting information about this.

Fans/temperature: type in a terminal “top” to show the running processes sorted by cpu usage. May be some process goes wild.

Added:
I have no access to the machine where I installed brave, but google chrome has the same problem:
In your home directory, there is a folder .config (dot config) which is normally invisible, There should be a folder containing “brave”, brave.com if I remember correctly, with a subfolder brave-browser. Delete the files SingletonCookie and
SingletonLock in that folder.

The problem occurs upon hostname change. Have you set a static hostname?
Apparently, the reverse IP lookup of the FritzBox counts heavily for chrome based browser. If the Fritzbox does the same as my ISP router, may be a wacky Wifi connection might induce counting and thus hostname change.

4

Exactly that is the spooky part. There shouldn’t be a hostname fedora-2.

I killed my Pc a couple of times due to freezing. Does it have to do with that?
Firefox works just fine.

   Static hostname: (unset)                         
  Transient hostname: fedora.fritz.box

Well I left my PC alone for a couple of hours now. The touchpad issue seems to be an overheating issue. I can understand the freezes when I was downloading some ISOs inside my virtual machine, copying them back and fourth, while having brave open on the host. That might be heavy lifting for my PC. But last time the freezes happened while I was playing around with Widgets. I had quiet a lot sensor stuff on my Desktop and brave was open again. Almost lets me think that everything is just a brave related problem. Can too many widgets cause overheating? I just wanted to see what KDE is capable of. I deleted all of them now and it seems to be better but can’t test brave as I can’t open it.

I opened VMWare again to see how much that process is using and it peaks around 450%! Didn’t kow, that that’s even possible. The process kcompactd0 peakes around 80%. There was nothing using too much before opening VMWare. Is my PC even capable enough for using VMs all the time? It seems to be working at least, but the PC gets pretty hot.

Is it possible that I have any weird settings in auto-cpufreq or are there any other energy settings I can check?

5

Regarding the USB problem, I tried to reboot my PC to see if mounting over the Terminal changed something, but still cannot mount with Dolphin or the system tray.

6

I searched manually in that folder and tried to use the search function in Dolphin, but there doesn’t seem to be any files with that name.

Edit: Nevermind, I found it under .config/BraveSoftware/Brave-Browser. And it solved the issue. Thank you!

7

You can try to set a static hostname with “sudo hostnamectl set-hostname --static fedora” Now it takes the name the Fritzbox assigns, and apparently this changed due to freezes.

The two files are not present if brave is not running, but then I would expect brave to start. If not, you could try to rename the whole “.config/BraveSoftware” folder, but then you start brave from scratch. Oops, I see: solved. Great.

No experience with VMWare, probably 450% means it uses 100% on 4 cores + a bit.
That’s a lot. I would expect that VMWare cpu use scales with cpu use of the VM’s inside…

USB: I know there are some issues reported with mounting USB drives under Dolphin. You can type: “sudo lsblk” or “sudo blkid” to see whether they are visible for the OS, and mount manually. I do not know VMWare, but in the standard Linux qemu/kvm virtualization, USB interfaces passed to a VM are lost for the OS.

8

Could this be a hint?

but it’s for a number of versions before. Unclear state.

From Redhat Bugzilla
https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=1694305

I have since determined how to resolve this completely for VMware Workstation but it is not ideal.

Turn off memory page trimming in VMware, this appears to be done on a per VM basis:

VM → Settings → Options → Advanced → Settings → memory page trimming is not allowed

This appears to stop VMware and the Linux kernel kcompactd from fighting each other.

9

It is visible for the OS, and I know that it’s not shown when using the VM. As I wrote before mounting with terminal command is possible. But neither the notification window nor dolphin are letting me mount it.

Regarding Brave, it seems to use four different processes while running. In total they are using up to 60% youtube running in the backround and quiet a few tabs open, but I have the feeling that that’s too much. Firefox doesn’t seem to need so much.
Should I switch to another Browser? I just like to have two Browsers for different use cases.

10

That might be quiet a good hint, but I have to read through it first, just quickly looked into it. I’ll try to change that setting and will let you know if it helps in a while.

I’m using version 17.6.0 build-24238078
The VM can use 6 Cores and 8 GB of ram. Are those settings viable for my PC?

Also VMware tells me that there is an update every time I start it, but the update fails every time. I read somewhere (I think it was in the Broadcom forum) that it’s a known issue, but the workaround seems to be more complicated than I like it. That’s why I would stick with my version atm.

Other than that I installed qemu/kvm and Virtual Machine Manager already but didn’t set up another VM yet, because I don’t have enough space on my SSD anymore. I want to try it in the near future, but I just want to use my PC in the first place and not setting things up all the time.

Oh and my PC is still qiet hot, at least I think it’s too hot. I have just Firefox and Brave running atm. I would say the performance was better with Windows, but I had a lot of other issues with it, and I really don’t want to switch back. In the end all of this lets me assume that there might be a way to better optimise my System.

Edit: Sorry If that sounded a bit rude, it’s not meant to be by any means. I’m just a bit annoyed. I love the open source comunity and I’m able to help myself with linux way easier than with Windows.

11

I hope it helps you, the symptoms you describe clearly resemble the problems described there. A workaround on the linux kernel configuration side and a workaround on VM configuration, so something should work.

I normally use Firefox, traditionally, with some excursions to google-chrome or even tried edge. Probably the internet is full of discussions which is better or worse, but probably they are all memory-hungry.

8 Gbyte of ram for a VM on a 14.4G system is quite a lot, I think. You can run “top” again and press capital-M to get the most memory consuming program on top. RES is resident memory and an indication how much memory is really used.
Do you have a swap partition or swapfile to set aside memory which is not needed immediately? Fedora uses by default ZRAM, it’s RAM memory where memory is stored compressed which would be else swapped out to disk.
But if both RAM and ZRAM are filled up, the system comes to a halt, unless the OOM-killer destroys some processes. No idea how well ZRAM cooperates with VMware.

12

That’s my swap:

Filename                                Type            Size            Used            Priority
/dev/zram0                              partition       8388604         0               100

Last time it crashed (using the VM, running brave and copying files), It used approximately one third of the swap if I remember it correctly. I know that because I used the Widgets to monitor my System at that time. I deleted all of them now because, they might use too many ressources as well, but it was interesting to see what my system does. The problem is, that it crashed without widgets before as well. Do you think 8 Gb for the VM is too much for my host to handle? Is it better to reduce it? I just read somewhere that approx half of the ram for the VM is ok, and I wanted to make sure it runs smoothly. Also VMWare automatically copies files into the cache. That might be handy when copying text, but causes troubles when copying big files and I have a shared folder for that anyway. Don’t know if there is a solution for that.

Do you want me to copy the output of “top”? With or without VM running? Still didn’t read the linked thread, and don’t know if I have enough time today to trouble shoot the VM. I think I’ll probably do that tommorow.

Without VM it’s

top - 17:09:00 up  3:00,  2 users,  load average: 0.34, 0.59, 0.78
Tasks: 399 total,   1 running, 398 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
%Cpu(s):  0.4 us,  0.5 sy,  0.0 ni, 98.9 id,  0.2 wa,  0.0 hi,  0.0 si,  0.0 st 

    PID USER      PR  NI    VIRT    RES    SHR S  %CPU  %MEM     TIME+ COMMAND                                                                                                              
   5550 Patrick   20   0 5116168 637796 193768 S   0.0   4.2   0:05.67 plasma-discover                                                                                                      
   4311 Patrick   20   0   11.5g 526000 270660 S   0.3   3.5   6:58.04 firefox                                                                                                              
   2698 Patrick   20   0 7186612 473416 202900 S   0.0   3.1   0:23.44 plasmashell                                                                                                          
   4011 Patrick   20   0   33.3g 464316 283664 S   0.0   3.1   1:43.53 brave                                                                                                                
   4103 Patrick   20   0 1156.7g 413972 142500 S   0.7   2.7  14:25.43 brave                                                                                                                
   2426 Patrick   -2   0 2746600 297740 219208 S   2.7   2.0   5:21.98 kwin_wayland                                                                                                         
   4603 Patrick   20   0 2876192 244988 107600 S   1.3   1.6   3:45.64 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   4280 Patrick   20   0 1156.6g 244076 131636 S   0.7   1.6   1:08.22 brave                                                                                                                
   4689 Patrick   20   0 2961140 230756 110248 S   0.0   1.5   0:26.52 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   6440 Patrick   20   0 2833768 208020 101072 S   0.0   1.4   0:06.50 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   6233 Patrick   20   0 2859380 207168  99724 S   0.0   1.4   0:11.23 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   4059 Patrick   20   0   33.2g 206416 133316 S   0.0   1.4   4:41.09 brave                                                                                                                
   6974 Patrick   20   0 2781656 194960 103812 S   0.0   1.3   0:13.57 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   4661 Patrick   20   0 1156.6g 189000 121740 S   0.0   1.2   0:03.13 brave                                                                                                                
   4782 Patrick   20   0 1156.6g 187132 118016 S   0.0   1.2   0:03.54 brave                                                                                                                
   5151 Patrick   20   0 1762180 184184 157536 S   1.3   1.2   0:17.54 konsole                                                                                                              
  10247 Patrick   20   0 2762108 181300 103112 S   0.0   1.2   0:03.28 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   2743 Patrick   20   0 2285664 174748 130032 S   0.0   1.2   0:00.51 polkit-kde-auth                                                                                                      
   3508 Patrick   20   0 2551580 163840 130284 S   0.0   1.1   0:00.73 akonadi_unified                                                                                                      
   3495 Patrick   20   0 2193528 161652 129672 S   0.0   1.1   0:00.77 akonadi_archive                                                                                                      
   3148 Patrick   20   0 1835872 161616 140948 S   0.0   1.1   0:00.68 DiscoverNotifie                                                                                                      
   3503 Patrick   20   0 2193648 161492 129564 S   0.0   1.1   0:00.74 akonadi_mailfil                                                                                                      
   3151 Patrick   20   0 2186976 159532 127648 S   0.0   1.1   0:00.99 kalendarac                                                                                                           
   4828 Patrick   20   0 1159.9g 159304 109096 S   0.0   1.1   0:02.78 brave                                                                                                                
   3507 Patrick   20   0 2113964 158068 126236 S   0.0   1.0   0:00.71 akonadi_sendlat                                                                                                      
   4060 Patrick   20   0   32.8g 155340 130176 S   0.0   1.0   0:23.86 brave                                                                                                                
   9891 Patrick   20   0 2748856 151272  95128 S   0.0   1.0   0:01.71 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   2547 Patrick   20   0 2360664 150612 115344 S   0.0   1.0   0:03.57 maliit-keyboard                                                                                                      
   2654 Patrick   20   0 2134904 145044 120096 S   0.0   1.0   0:05.04 kded6                                                                                                                
   4549 Patrick   20   0   18.9g 144856  85836 S   0.0   1.0   0:13.75 WebExtensions                                                                                                        
   4963 Patrick   20   0 1280848 141676  91200 S   0.0   0.9   0:07.96 vmware                                                                                                               
   4655 Patrick   20   0 1156.6g 138652 106444 S   0.0   0.9   0:00.41 brave                                                                                                                
   3105 Patrick   20   0 2000916 138128 111140 S   0.0   0.9   0:00.50 xwaylandvideobr                                                                                                      
   4719 Patrick   20   0 2712716 126228  92584 S   0.0   0.8   0:03.39 Isolated Web Co                                                                                                      
   4488 Patrick   20   0 2693136 122364  86328 S   0.0   0.8   0:03.68 Privileged Cont                                                                                                      
   4336 Patrick   20   0   32.8g 122156 102700 S   0.0   0.8   0:36.79 brave                                                                                                                
   3094 Patrick   20   0 1711260 121964  99324 S   0.0   0.8   0:00.41 kdeconnectd                                                                                                          
   4174 Patrick   20   0 1158.2g 120600  82172 S   0.0   0.8   0:10.05 brave                                                                                                                
   4241 Patrick   20   0 1711316 120580  98972 S   0.0   0.8   0:02.45 plasma-browser-                                                                                                      
   2558 Patrick   20   0 1038596 119896  76192 S   0.0   0.8   0:33.68 Xwayland                                                                                                             
   2745 Patrick   20   0 1709360 116396  94728 S   0.0   0.8   0:00.71 xdg-desktop-por                                                                                                      
   3765 Patrick   20   0 1671900 113636  93428 S   0.0   0.7   0:00.26 kwalletd6

Am I right if I would guess that KDE itself is pretty resource heavy? Can’t really compare it as I just used standard Ubuntu before and it’s like 1-2 years since I used my old Laptop. Without having a clue I wouldn’t see anything suspicious.

PS: I’m not really comfortable to leak my user name this way, but hey, nice to meet you!

Edit just for clarity: freezes affected the whole system, and not just the VM. It happened without running VM while messing around with Widgets. I don’t think that just the Widgets can use so much ram. Can they?

13

The “top” listing looks fine. Apparently, both brave and firefox are there, brave with a number of brave processes, Firefox with “Isolated Web content”.

The zram is capped to 8 Gbyte, so effectively you have 6.4 + x*8 G ram+swap available, with x an undefined floating point number >=1.0 See “zramctl” for actual real and compressed size of the zram. For workstation use perfectly fine, I think. Yes, KDE is considered a rather heavy desktop environment.
If Widgets cause a freeze, it should not be memory, I think. Does CTRL-ALT-F3 show a login prompt? In that case there is something wrong with graphics.

With qemu/kvm, a 2G Mint22 machine with firefox and libreoffice writer loaded takes 2.1G resident memory on my 8G system, Internally, it has already 447M in it’s local swap file.

I would first solve the 400% cpu problem of VMware, and I think I would be more comfortable with say 16G additional real swapspace. Not really nice on a SSD, but the zram will take the first batch before going to physical swap.

Check also the system log for “oom” events. Fedora has a systemd-oomd process monitoring processes for excessive use of resources.