Emacs freezes regularly: how to identify the cause?

Emacs freezes regularly: how to identify the cause?

[Geza Giedke]

Hello, 

I've been using Emacs for a long time and hardly can do without it.
In the last months, however, it freezes[1] nearly each week and
sometimes several times each day, and all I can then do is kill it and
recover all the open and unsaved buffers manually. How do I best start
to find out what's the cause?

I'm running GNU Emacs version 21.3.1 (i586-suse-linux, X toolkit,
Xaw3d scroll bars) od 2004-12-17 of d71 on a Suse 9.2 system with KDE
(now 3.3, but it was similar, when I had 3.2). Usually there are 4-5
windows open, running VM, a couple of LaTeX and Matlab files. The
problem typically occurs when I switch from one virtual desktop to
another, with no other regularity that I could detect. How could I go
about diagnosing what's happening? 
Thank you for your help,

Geza


[1] all windows get blank, doesn't respond to C-g or any other key;
does not respond to kill, but only kill -9

-- 
 Geza Giedke, Wehntalerstrasse 309, CH-8046 Zuerich

 Institut fuer Quantenelektronik, ETH Zuerich

Re: Emacs freezes regularly: how to identify the cause?

[Konstantin Levinski]

As a starting point, you could run it under gdb, and when emacs
freeses, kill it and see the backtrace. ('bt' command in gdb).

Re: Emacs freezes regularly: how to identify the cause?

[Geza Giedke]

Thank you for the hint. I'm doing this, and I'll see what I can learn.


Konstantin Levinski <konstantin.levinski@gmail.com> wrote:
> As a starting point, you could run it under gdb, and when emacs
> freeses, kill it and see the backtrace. ('bt' command in gdb).


-- 
 Geza Giedke, Wehntalerstrasse 309, CH-8046 Zuerich

 Institut fuer Quantenelektronik, ETH Zuerich