In Windows 10, when the pc would get stuck/freeze I could press Ctrl+Alt+Del keys and a window called task manager would pop up, which allowed me to close the application.exe that was consuming 100% of memory cpu/gpu/ram.
Is there something similar in EndeavourOS KDE?
In the 3D rendering program Blender, sometimes there are 3D models that require more ram, and although I have 16gb of swap, sometimes this is not enough and the pc gets stuck/freezes.
I press Ctrl+Alt+Spru, or Alt+F4, or Alt+Tab, but nothing seems to work, after waiting 15-20 minutes, I can only reboot the pc by pressing the reset button (which I hate to do).
I know the problem is that my pc is not very powerful, but I test many different 3D models every day, and 90% of them perform well.
So what should I do when my EndeavorOS KDE gets stuck/frozen?
Is there a task manager or something like that, or maybe a procedure I can follow?
But I can’t figure out how exactly it works. I’m using EndeavourOS KDE (with everything default, since I’m new to Linux).
So, when Blender takes up all memory and my pc is stuck/frozen, the best option would be to kill the process, and everything works fine again, or maybe it’s better to restart directly?
What do you all usually do?
Also, it seems that I have to press Alt+SysRq+ LETTER, and choose a letter of the alphabet to do a specific function.
So the correct thing would be to press Alt+SysRq+b (b = reboot), and then my pc would reboot without breaking anything?
Because I have also read that you have to press the letters REISUBReboot Even If System Utterly Broken in order.
How much ram do you have? If you only have 4 gb of ram, 16 gb of swap isn’t going to be of much help if you’re doing heavy 3D modelling.
To what degree? If the system is still responsive (you can still move your mouse and type on the keyboard, just that it’s slow), you don’t have to resort to the magic key. The magic key is for situations where the system has utterly crapped itself – it doesn’t respond to input at all.
Of course there is. I believe KDE comes with its own system monitor.
Well, if the system is still responsive (it still registers keyboard input, for example), just create a keyboard shortcut and bind it to a killall command or something? Your desktop environment allows you to create custom keyboard shortcuts, so you can take advantage of that. Choose a keybinding that you rarely use (like Win + z) and bind it to killall blender (I’m only guessing the process name, so you have to check the actual name of the process to kill).
Another alternative is to try switching to a TTY first. Alt + Ctrl + F2 will switch you to TTY2. From TTY 2, you can perform the usual diagnostics tasks like check journal entries or kill problematic processes.
When the system doesn’t respond to anything you do, resort to the magic key. The way you use it is quite straight forward. The article written by Kresimir explained it clearly, so you might want to go through it again.
My pc is very old, i5-3470, gtx 1050 ti 4 gb, 8gb ram, SSD 240gb (with EOS KDE) + SSD 240gb (empty) + HDD 250gb (empty). And I created a 16gb swap when I installed EndeavourOS.
Now I regret it and I would like to have 32gb of swap, maybe that way Blender would work correctly.
Some 3D models that have less polygons, during rendering, it takes time to minimize firefox, etc. But when the rendering is finished, everything works fine again.
Other 3D models, which have more polygons, cause the mouse to go slow, get stuck for a few seconds, and have a visual effect like going at 5 fps. When this happens, I can try closing them with atl+f4, or ctrl+alt+del (I’m new to Linux, so I only know Windows 10 commands). Or I try to right click on the rendering window and hit close.
And finally there are other models, which have a lot of polygons, 8k textures, etc. (I can’t be figuring out how many polygons each Blender 3D file has or what textures they have, because there are so many).
These 3D models, make the pc start to go slow as in the second example, but I trust that I can finish the rendering (test rendering, to know if my pc will get stuck again or not, which is usually only 1 sample in 200x200 pixels, instead of 4096 samples at 1080p for example, that not even my pc could render that).
Then the pc starts to slow down, until finally the screen freezes, mouse cursor, everything. I try alt+f4, ctrl+alt+delete, wait about 15 minutes and see that the time doesn’t change, so the screen hasn’t been updated, and since I’m new to Linux, so I reboot by pressing the physical reset button (I hate do this a lot).
I think the problem occurs during texture preloading, since the rendering hasn’t even started, so you may be right, and it’s a lack of ram problem, together with very old components. It is possible that increasing the swap to, say, 32gb, could help me a bit with this, I don’t really know.
Can you tell me the name of the app please? I can’t find it on my EndeavourOS KDE, I did a default install, I mean, during the EndeavourOS install I selected KDE, and I left all the default installer packages, so I think I must have it.
Although this won’t help me when the screen is frozen, but it may help me in other cases.
Omg, is this an article? I thought it was a quote, I’m dumb! I’m going to read it right now!
About killing processes, I didn’t know that this was possible, it’s a good idea to have something like that as a secondary plan, I’m going to look for video tutorials on how to kill processes with keyboard shortcuts, so I could kill the exact name of the Blender process or something so though I hope this doesn’t hurt Blender.
I’m also going to look into the KILLALL you mention, it seems to be a command.
By the way, what is “TTY”? I don’t know if it’s an abbreviation, sorry my English is very bad.
Thank you very much friend, now I have where to start!
This is probably a lot of your issue. Blender is intense. I know one guy who does a lot of blender work, and he’s got a newer i9 with 128gb ram . You may need to be very careful using it at your specs