Strange issue with LMDE and Skype

[mark1mint]

I've recently had this very strange issue with Skype 2.2.0.35-1 in LMDE: all of a sudden Skype has caused a massive freeze of the whole system,along with a massive disk activity and total unresponsiveness to any command or input,including trying to restart from a console with Ctrl+Shift+F2 .
What exactly happened is that,whilst using various other programs (including Firefox with a youtube video playing),I've sent a chat message (the first time this happened) or just entered my password to login (the second time),which triggered this havoc on the system,provoking an instant frenetic disk activity and the impossibility to do anything,not even killing skype from a terminal or restart the system,as there was no response from either keyboard or mouse whilst this massive disk activity was going on,then when this freeze finally ended after maybe a couple of minutes,I've observed that actually a huge amount of swap had been used and the most relevant processes in top where related -if memory serves-to pulseaudio.
Before using Skype the total system load was very low and the amount of available memory pretty reasonable,so I'm totally sure that this is due to some Skype's fault or bug,also because no other program,even when using lots of them at the same time,has ever triggered such an issue.Does anyone have an idea of what may have happened? Is,whilst we are on it,a closed-source program that eventually causes such issues still safe to use in your opinion ?

[lizbeth]

http://beta.skype.com/en/download-skype ... -computer/

[mark1mint]

So ? Are you suggesting to try the newer version? Maybe this is a known bug of the 2.2.0.35-1 version ?

[lizbeth]

I don't know of any bug. There is a newer and likely better version that is worth trying. I have never heard of such a thing. You omitted so many things in your post that it is impossible to say much of anything about your problem. For example, what is your computer system specs and how is your lmde install configured ie swap space and other partitions. These things matter.

[Bonsaii]

Hi mark1mint,

You are not alone. I got the same problem with Skype and read about it elsewhere too.

A failing internet connection caused the problem on my machine.
Fortunately, that is rare. But a hard reset is all I can do then.

[jjaythomas]

Skype is a 32bit application
[bSO][/b]
if on 64bit
I found (using unetbootin, also a 32 bit app I think). The fix given (on mints blog page) for 'mint14rc 64bit cleared it up.

Don't know about skype tho
J.Jay

Forgot this using a fresh install of LMDE-Xfce 64 bit upgraded to upack5

[mark1mint]

In my case there was no issue at all with the internet connection,everything was perfectly normal until I did compose a message and hit the send button in the first case,or just entered my password and hit the sent button,then instantly things went out of control.No other application has ever caused such an issue,not even memory-intensive applications like photo editing programs or huge Firefox sessions with hundreds of tabs open-as for the swap space I think it's adequate as I have 6 GB of swap space as opposed to 4 GB of RAM,based on what I've read so far you shouldn't really need twice the size of your memory for swap space,in fact many suggestions are along the lines of making the swap equal in size as the memory,unless you don't run scientific programs who would likely require a lot more of it.
If you think that more specific informations are needed,please let me know-maybe the output of inxi -F could be useful ?