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I'm running Lubuntu at quite an old MacBook (6.1). Trying to keep it up-to-date so for the moment it's 14.04. Several months ago (after one of the updates) a strange problem arose: at a random moment of time touchpad becomes veeeery laggy so there's absolutely no way you can continue working - the only thing to help is a reboot. At the same time there's no extra CPU usage or anything extraordinary I've noticed. Spent long time looking for a clues but all I've found is that the problem appears only when Google Chrome is open.

Turned off Chrome extension I've used - still there.
Found somewhere that reinstalling ibus could fix the problem, but it didn't.
Tried to use Chromium instead of Chrome - no help (strange if it were though).
While switched Chrome to Chromium noticed that until PepperFlash installation (since there's no flash support in the latest version) Chromium didn't raise the problem, but I've use it without plugin for quite a short time so it might just be my luck (unluck?)...

So could you please guide me in this challenge? I would appreciate any ideas on where to start looking...

FlasH from Ru
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  • Try running top in the terminal (Ctrl+Alt+T) and posting the output from right before you start Chrome and after the lagginess has been happening for a bit. It might be Chrome/Chromium is taking up a lot of RAM for whatever reason. – RPiAwesomeness Aug 26 '14 at 22:07
  • @RPiAwesomeness, will try (might be a good idea to add top/htop to start right after login), but it's possibly not RAM: once the lagginess occurred it's not going away even after I kill all Chrome/Chromium processes... – FlasH from Ru Aug 27 '14 at 09:26
  • What do you run for killing Chrome/Chromium? Depending on what you did, there may be resident zombie processes still. – RPiAwesomeness Aug 27 '14 at 11:03
  • @RPiAwesomeness, good point. I used standard LXTask - doublechecked and found Show root tasks were off, but still I don't remember having high total RAM consumption during lagginess... Anyway put htop to autostart. – FlasH from Ru Aug 27 '14 at 19:26
  • Just caught it once again - htop shows 467/3753MB memory and ~3% of both CPU cores usage. Seems like lags are not caused by system overload. Any more ideas? And is there a way to restart input (mouse and keyboard) drivers on a running system? – FlasH from Ru Sep 01 '14 at 21:42
  • Yeah, it doesn't appear to be an overload issue...I'm actually without an Ubuntu system (I'm in withdrawal :( ) and will be so for quite a while...I don't know of anything else off the top of my head, but I can always research :) Google-fu activated. – RPiAwesomeness Sep 01 '14 at 21:57
  • Caught it once again - in kern.log found irq 23: nobody cared (try booting with the "irqpoll" option) ... Disabling IRQ #23 at about the time it happened. Also found several forum reports of a major system slowdown after such records in log.

    So added irqpoll and waiting for the issue...

     – FlasH from Ru Sep 11 '14 at 18:55

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Well, it's been 2 months after I've applied the fix and the problem hasn't reappeared since then - assuming the fix is permanent: just added irqpoll to the end of my kernel boot command at grub.conf like the kern.log said (also found at https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic-t-780725-start-0.html)

Editor's Note
Check this question for setting boot parameter: How do I add a kernel boot parameter?

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FlasH from Ru
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  • Is it Grub.ini or grub in /etc/default/grub? – Anwar Nov 29 '16 at 07:30
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    @Anwar, that was 2 years ago and I don't actually remember details anymore %) But that should have been grub.conf, not grub.ini (answer updated), which is not there anymore for grub2 - see the the editor's link + http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/ubuntu-63/adding-irqpoll-to-etc-default-grub-file-installation-99-there-868457/ – FlasH from Ru Nov 29 '16 at 15:26