Re: Okular locked up my system and left no evidence
10 Feb 2023, 01:03 by borden_c@tutanota.com:
> I was trying to fill out a PDF form on Okular and my system started crawling to halt on text fields until it locked up completely. SSD stayed solid on (so God knows how many write cycles it gluttoned), fan went into overdrive trying to keep the circuitry from frying, and the computer completely froze. I couldn't even SSH in to shut down programs because my frozen computer couldn't spare any resources to authenticate remote access. The only log entries indicating that something was amiss was:
>
> boinc[1409]: 10-Feb-2023 00:22:44 [---] Suspending computation - CPU is busy
> boinc[1409]: 10-Feb-2023 00:22:57 [---] Resuming computation
>
> Followed by a 10-minute gap in all logs until I hard-rebooted the system.
>
> So unless I missed something in one of the logs, there's nothing anyone can do about this other than note for posterity that KDE and Linux still have systemic design flaws. Rogue apps can still cripple the system without leaving any evidence whatsoever of what went wrong. And until it leaves evidence, there's no way to identify the bugs. Just frustrated users and lost data when you can't save what you're working on.
>
> Maybe a doctoral student is working on these design issues so this doesn't happen. If not, there should be.
>
> Vent over. Thank you for reading.
>
Supplemental to rant, which may be more productive.
There's a grave problem with how Okular processes PDF forms. Simple, short-answer text entry has ballooned a simple 1 MB file into a 1.2 GB file. This would explain (but not excuse) the excessive CPU and hard-drive usage. It probably also maxed out the RAM and caused the system to freeze.
Workaround: avoid using Okular to complete PDF forms at all costs!!!
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