It’s been happening for a while now. I wasn’t sure what was going on, but today I had a lot more lag and then suddenly I got this error warning, so I have to assume it’s something going on with Dolphin or some kind of memory leak? Or maybe something worse like a virus? Hopefully not. Has anyone else been experiencing something like this? What can I do to diagnose? I also have two third party drivers installed, one for my Brother laser printer, and one for an Epson photo scanner, from their respective official sites. Not sure if that can be a culprit.
I also got a message a few seconds later I think about a crash involving usr/bin/gs ? A week ago I also tried a separate fresh Fedora KDE 44 install on an external SSD and even though I only used it for a short while, I didn’t notice any weird stuttering or lag in the short while I used it. It could have eventually appeared though.
Edit: I forgot: I have 32gb of RAM, running on a 7800X3D and a 7900XTX.
High memory usage forcing swapping definitely explains the system lag.
/usr/bin/gs is GhostScript. It’s unlikely to cause memory issues unless it’s in the middle of loading a particularly large PostScript or PDF file.
As for Dolphin… there’s KDE’s default file manager; there’s the similarly named web browser for Android and iOS; and then there’s the Nintendo GameCube and Wii emulator.
Based on the screenshot showing Linux’s OOM (out of memory) killer axing a systemd service named “app-dolphin”, and that KDE’s Dolphin file manager doesn’t have a systemd service, it’s more likely that the emulator is installed.
Does your system still lag after OOM kills the “app-dolphin” service?
To make sure there aren’t any residual processes still running, reboot, and then see if the system lag returns.
It might not be the culprit, but an emulator is certainly high on the list, but we’d need to see output from dmesg, free and other details to diagnose.
I also thought it might have been dolphin emulator, which i had installed through the official flatpak repository from the instructions on the official dolphin emulator site. So I uninstalled it and removed the repository and updated and restarted the PC. The same message about linux kernel killing the process happened again as soon as I opened the dolphin file browser.
I don’t have any dolphin web browser. Also the lag/stuttering has been happening for a while after updating to KDE 44, but only today this linux kernel killing dolphin thing started and now after it happened once it seems to keep happening any time I open the dolphin file browser.
How would I use dmesg and free to get logs? And would they contain any potential personal info or info i should keep private for security purposes that I have to look for and remove before posting here?
Also when I tried getting the status on that service I get this:
~$ systemctl status app-dolphin@a841e68d63624e10b872b679019b3a16.service Unit app-dolphin@a841e68d63624e10b872b679019b3a16.service could not be found.
~$ systemctl status dolphin@a841e68d63624e10b872b679019b3a16.service Unit dolphin@a841e68d63624e10b872b679019b3a16.service could not be found.
After restarting the PC the new linux kernel kill message I got said the service was just dolphin now without all those extra numbers afterwards.
Updating from an earlier Fedora release? (if so, which one)
Open a terminal window and type the command free. It’s output is just basic info about memory and swap usage without any personal info whatsover.
dmesg (ideally, add the ‘-T’ flag to include timestamps) outputs info from the Linux kernel’s ring buffer (kinda like Linux’s short-term memory while it’s thinking). It contains info about the boot process, hardware devices, etc. Whether or not there’s personal info is mostly subjective – there might be serial numbers and such, but they’re easy to spot and redact if desired.
I could’ve made a typo while transcribing from your screenshot, but the username I typed (a841e68d624e10b872b679019b3a16) doesn’t match yours above.
The command above breaks down to “systemctl status unit@username.servce” where “app-dolphin” is the service unit name and “a841e68d63624e10b872b679019b3a16” is the username.
Either way, since Dolphin Emulator was uninstalled, it should’ve also removed the user it added when it was previously installed, so it wouldn’t be unusual for systemd to say the service couldn’t be found.
