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Recently, after using my desktop machine for a day or so, the oddest thing will start happening: Every second, the desktop will briefly freeze, then continue, like a heartbeat. The interval is one second exactly —I measured with a stopwatch— though every six or seven seconds, it will skip a beat.

Any audio will continue normally, as will the mouse-pointer. The rest freezes, which is particularly noticeable with running video and text-editing. But it's only within X; the tty1 terminal doesn't suffer from this. And restarting X will temporarily fix the problem.

The regularity of this occurrence, as well as the fact that I always have plenty of free memory and idle cores left, makes me suspect that some process is running on a timer, co-opting the video-card. But I can't figure out what it is. I can't find anything useful in the dmesg or X logs.

Here is some info that might be useful (let me know if I should add more):

  • Distro: Gentoo Linux (kernel: linux-3.7.1-gentoo)
  • Desktop: Gnome3
  • CPU: Intel Core i7 (quadcore)
  • VGA: GeForce 9500 GT (driver: Nouveau 1.0.8)

It's probably overpowered for the general multitasking I use it for.

I know my kernel is somewhat out-of-date, but I think I'd actually be a bit frustrated if a kernel update fixed the problem, because then I'll never know what caused it. :-)

Any ideas?

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7 Answers 7

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Periodic freezes are in my experience usually caused by the hard disk. Check your hard disk status with smartctl:

smartctl -a /dev/sda | less

Also run a selftest (that will take a few hours):

smartctl -t long /dev/sda

Later query it with smartctl -a again to see the result.

Also check your dmesg output, there could be error messages that could point you in the right direction.

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Do you happen to have a script that queries xrandr? I was noticing freezes every 3 seconds and then I remembered I had a script that would call xrandr every 3 seconds to check if an external monitor had been plugged in (and if so, switch to it.) I don't know why querying xrandr does this, but hey.

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I tried for hours to get the same problem on my pc fixed. It turned out it was the HDMI cord. I changed it for a another one I had as a backup and it worked!. Idk why it was causing my entire system to freeze every 2 or 3 secs like clock work, but a new cord fixed it for me.

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  • I never would have guessed this. But indeed, it was a loose DVI cable in my case! Commented Nov 14, 2023 at 5:52
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Had this problem and it turned out my HDMI cable was not all the way into the port. Pushed it in, and voila... So before doing more extensive changes to your system, please check on your HDMI cable.

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  • This is very specific, but their problem could be a multitude of things. Commented Jun 29, 2022 at 17:19
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For me, I found out that evolution-calendar-factory was doing these micro-freezes. So, simply disabling it by:

sudo mv /usr/lib/evolution-data-server /usr/lib/evolution-data-server-disabled sudo mv /usr/lib/evolution /usr/lib/evolution-disabled

Should stop 'em!

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Do you happen to have a dual monitor setup? It happens to me too, and I have found no solution so far, even after hours and hours of forum browsing.

I checked the logs, and it seems like when this problem occurs, the system reinitializes the secondary monitor every second, as it it was re-pluged every second. This causes the minifreezes.

The short-term solution is to physically unplug/re-plug the secondary monitor. The minifreezes should stop. Until next reboot...

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Had this problem with Mint 19.1. Noticed I had 2-sec freezes but upon testing, it affected my account only. So I deleted ~/.cinnamon from the command line. A process list simply had to much to bother isolating the offending program but at any rate, system works perfectly now.

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  • 1
    Deleting ~/.cinnamon won't make any difference if the desktop environment is Gnome3, as described in the question. Commented May 19, 2019 at 5:29
  • Indeed. You are correct. I posted this because I was searching for a solution to 'UI freezes on Linux Mint' when I arrived at this post from my search results. I figured, it might also attract other people having a similar problem on various other distros. Since each GUI will have an equivalent directory, it may point someone in the right direction. Commented May 23, 2019 at 0:19

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