Suddenly, lately, I’m getting these black windows: “. . . [app] is not working.”/“You may choose to wait a short while for it to continue or force the application to quit entirely.” with buttons for Force Quit and Wait. Sometimes, it goes away spontaneously and I work without losing unsaved work. Sometimes, it goes away spontaneously, comes back, and goes away again. If I click a button, usually it’s Wait and then it’s okay. This has happened with LibreOffice, Firefox, and the Gnome app Files (probably a/k/a Nautilus). I don’t remember if it happened with any other app.
This used to be occasional and I’d Force Quit. Maybe I had clicked on an app’s button 20 times and then I’d get this. That made sense, and was helpful. But now I’m getting it when I alt-tab to an app window and maybe clicked in the app’s window once or not at all. And I’m getting it often. Rebooting, warm or cold, is not solving this.
Maybe it started after a recent F32 update, but I don’t know.
I’m getting slownesses, too. I’ll wake my computer but then logging in through my screensaver is often slow. Or I’ll close a Firefox tab and it closes so slowly that, after it closes, no other tab is self-selected for a bunch of seconds, maybe a minute, and I have to wait foor a tab to become the new default before I can do anything with any tab. I don’t know if that’s related to the Force Quit problem.
I speak words not fit for family radio and my computer, after a while, obeys, but, since the mic is off in hardware Setup, that’s not the cure.
What’s causing this? If it’s a bug and I should report it, which software has the bug?
— The problem is more likely to happen, and more repetitive within a minute or so, when I try to use an app after using other app(s); the longer I was away, the more the black window repeats. I usually click Wait each time.
— Sometimes, the black window appears, I click Wait, it goes away, and it soon comes back with no click anywhere in between. This happened with the Files app.
— Shortly before the dialog appears, I can’t do anything to the window that’s about to get the dialog. Clicking has no effect and the cursor won’t move. That’s for about a second or a few seconds and then the dialog appears.
— When I click Force Quit, sometimes the dialog just goes away, but sometimes it shrinks vertically, distorting but not hiding the text of the dialog, before it disappears altogether. This may be due to an underlying slowness.
— Slowness does not affect typing in LibreOffice Writer or Calc or in gedit (a text editor), or functionality in other apps.
Here’s the output of fpaste, run just before the latest update to Fedora (I removed the prompt line above it and the prompt on the last line) (this forum doesn’t let me post more than 2 links and the output below had 5 so I replaced each protocol signifier for secure Hypertext Transfer Protocol with the word s-link and each colon-slash-slash with a space and space-surrounded each dot, slash, and colon in the rest of a URL) (this forum doesn’t let me post more than 2 links to users and there are lots of at-signs so I replaced each at-sign with an opening angle bracket, which otherwise doesn’t appear in the output) (I don’t know if this forum shows leading spaces):
USB devices (lsusb):
Bus 002 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 008 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 007 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 006 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 001 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0002 Linux Foundation 2.0 root hub
Bus 005 Device 002: ID 0a5c:5800 Broadcom Corp. BCM5880 Secure Applications Processor
Bus 005 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 004 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
Bus 003 Device 004: ID 413c:8158 Dell Computer Corp. Integrated Touchpad / Trackstick
Bus 003 Device 003: ID 413c:8157 Dell Computer Corp. Integrated Keyboard
Bus 003 Device 002: ID 0a5c:4500 Broadcom Corp. BCM2046B1 USB 2.0 Hub (part of BCM2046 Bluetooth)
Bus 003 Device 001: ID 1d6b:0001 Linux Foundation 1.1 root hub
DRM Information (journalctl -k -b | grep -o ‘kernel:.drm.$’ | cut -d ’ ’ -f 2- ):
[drm] Supports vblank timestamp caching Rev 2 (21.10.2013).
[drm] Initialized i915 1.6.0 20200515 for 0000:00:02.0 on minor 0
fbcon: i915drmfb (fb0) is primary device
i915 0000:00:02.0: fb0: i915drmfb frame buffer device
i915 0000:00:02.0: [drm] HPD interrupt storm detected on connector DP-3: switching from hotplug detection to polling
Kernel buffer tail (dmesg | tail):
[ 7098.068442] wlp12s0: associated
[ 7098.795794] IPv6: ADDRCONF(NETDEV_CHANGE): wlp12s0: link becomes ready
[ 8158.980478] perf: interrupt took too long (5038 > 4983), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 39000
[ 8238.140033] perf: interrupt took too long (6345 > 6297), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 31000
[ 8347.245353] perf: interrupt took too long (7943 > 7931), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 25000
[ 8533.651558] perf: interrupt took too long (9945 > 9928), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 20000
[ 8866.042270] CE: hpet increased min_delta_ns to 20115 nsec
[ 9013.149592] perf: interrupt took too long (12433 > 12431), lowering kernel.perf_event_max_sample_rate to 16000
[12173.365397] dell_wmi: Unknown key with type 0x0011 and code 0xffd0 pressed
[13040.962684] dell_wmi: Unknown key with type 0x0011 and code 0xffd1 pressed
The swapping is quite significant and less than 3 GiB of RAM can be easily consumed with just browser, no need to mention other apps.
Thus, increasing RAM to about 8 GiB should be your main priority.
However note that laptops typically have hardware restrictions on the upper RAM limit, so check the documentation.
In addition, if you don’t have SSD yet, then HDD should be the next bottleneck.