Sometimes when I start or seek a video in VLC my system is getting extremely slow. I can move my mouse normally, but everything else freezes for a few seconds, everything besides the shown video advances a little bit (like the system has a few milliseconds of normality), freezes again, etc. I takes literally minutes to open task manager to kill the VLC process. After killing it everything is back to normal.
I can not reproduce this problem, I don’t know what and when it triggers. It happens about once in a few days. The only thing I know is that it happens if I try to open or seek a video (not suddenly while playback) and that it stays if I reopen any video until I restart the computer
I have
Xubuntu 17.04, up to date
current NVIDIA Drivers
Dual Monitors, VLC on the second one
Core i5, 8GB RAM
GTX 960 4GB
I tried to reinstall VLC, no success. Currently I try with a different renderer.
Does someone have an idea what could cause this problem? That might save me an aweful lot of testing
It sounds like something is eating more resources than it should. You could try opening VLC with the terminal to see if there is any output. Also, try opening the task manager before you use VLC to see if the resource usage spikes and you can get an idea of where things are going wrong.
I’m guessing, since most people nowadays have numerous things going on at once, that there is a browser with multiple tabs in the background, Steam, and maybe some other things running in the background. Some websites are amazingly terrible at eating RAM. One little picture in the background on a loop that just keeps downloading over and over can add up. Do you have a swap partition? It doesn’t happen a lot, but I also have only 8GB of RAM and occasionally have had a similar experience where I have to close something and it takes a minute or longer.
Once I start getting in excess of 10 tabs in Firefox I usually close the browser and reopen so the background tabs aren’t loaded. My options are set to save tabs on exit without asking, and of course not loading background tabs. There is really only one game I recently started playing that will consistently eat huge amounts of RAM and eventually bring my system to a crawl. It’s a lot of fun until that happens!
It’s not the file. had it with different files and after reboot everything is fine again. also, had it with files on my system drive (SSD) and from a network share. had it with TS, FLV and MP4 files. it’s not an encoding or file specific issue.
yes, it’s with video. with audio files I had it never so far. this is why I’m currently testing it with different renderers.
no, it’s not even 1080p in most cases. rather small resolution (720p I guess), mostly TV recordings
I don’t think so. I ran in memory limitation issues in the past a dozen times, this is different. EVERYTHING besides the mouse is frozen for seconds, it’s not only being super slow and cluncky. I have the usage monitor (XFCE plugin) in the task bar that shows me the CPU usage in realtime. And it hangs as well. Like there’s no drawing update for all screens. But also calculations don’t advance. Once I was playing a minigame while watching a video. I attempted to skip the ad break, it started, and my game advanced (incl. sound) only in the few milliseconds where the system reacts. So, I know it’s not only a graphical thing.
I mostly had Vivaldi open with less than 10 tabs. According to task manager memory usage was 30-60% if I remember right. But it was definatly never higher than 80%
Are you able to change TTY while this is happening? If so swap to a TTY and fire up htop then go back to your DE. When it happens again swap back to whichever tty you have htop running on and see whats happening from there.