[GNC] GnuCash v2.6.19-1 has started freezing on Ubuntu 18.04 after a recent system update

[Parke]

On Thu, Oct 17, 2019 at 12:17 AM Adrien Monteleone
<adrien.monteleone at lusfiber.net> wrote:
> Sorry, I was confusing things. It was libboost that was updated in bionic which should make building 3.7 easier. But I haven’t tried it in a while.

I realized another option might be to rebuild GnuCash 2.6.19 on an
updated 18.04.

However, (a) I cannot readily reproduce the freeze and (b) Ubuntu
19.10 has been released.  So I am likely to jump to 19.10, rather than
trying to diagnose the freeze on 18.04.

> That depends on how you did the update. If by apt in a terminal, there are several ways to see the upgrade/full-upgrade history.
>
> You can view, grep, tail, etc. on:
> /var/log/apt/history.log
> /var/log/dpkg.log

I used apt-get dist-upgrade, possibly preceded by apt-get upgrade.  It
looks like the information is logged in the files you mention.

> > When GnuCash freezes, the CPU cores on my system are mostly idle.  So
> > there is no CPU or disk bottleneck that I can see.
>
> Try starting htop first, (a little better formatted than simple ‘top’) then launch GnuCash, observe the resource hit, and keep an eye on it. See if you can trigger the crash while watching htop’s output. And of course, check the tracefile. These wiki pages might be of interest, particularly the section on tweaking the tracefile and running from the command line for more output:

I actually use both htop and top.

I believe the most recent freeze happened when there was at least 1GB
of free RAM (and probably at least 4GB free, I forget exactly).

I was mostly puzzled by the output of free:

$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:            15G        4.2G        9.5G         35M        1.9G         11G
Swap:            0B          0B          0B

Something is using 2.3G of RAM.  (4.2G - 1.9G = 2.3G).  What?  No
running process is using that much RAM.  And it is not "buff/cache".
I either need a better understanding of the information free displays,
or I need a tool that describes memory usage in more detail.

Thanks again for your help.

-Parke