get_apt_cache.p always Zombie Process, and now I'm seeing it as get_apt_cache.py

[BorrowedWifi]

This is one of those niggling little things that seems minor enough on the surface, but right now... I'm not so sure.

And I'm putting this here for anyone who might be digging around, trying to find out about "zombie" processes, or get_apt_cache.p or get_apt_cache.py running CONSTANTLY and unkillably as a zombie process.

Clearly mintmenu is the culprit, and I'm not going to get into the details of how that was figured out, and I'm dropping this here into the Mate area, because I do not know if it ever comes up anywhere else.

But for me, Mint Mate suffers from this strange little malady, and I've very recently realized that, despite it showing up as "N/A" in both Memory and Virtual Memory when checked using System Monitor, it has the power to adversly affect the performance of my machines, sometimes quite significantly.

I have a small Lenovo laptop with 8gigs of memory, I use as a knockabout music machine in my van, and it has always evidenced weird behavior, and will occasionally refuse to accept input while continuing to run well enough, playing music for me with VLC Media Player (which is how I notice it, when I attempt to skip to the next track, which I do a lot), and once this comatose state has been entered, the whole machine becomes unresponsive, even as the music happily keeps right on playing. Most of the time, it will come back to full vigorous life on its own in a minute or two, but not always. And sometimes it boots VERY slowly. And it's just... little stuff. Weird stuff. Stuff I've never been bothered to chase down.

Until yesterday, and I finally got mad at it, took it out of the van, and brought it in here where I'm sitting at my main machine (also running Mint Mate, both machines 21.3 Virginia) and started chasing it down, and found my zombie.

Long story short, once I had removed MintMenu and replaced it with Compact Menu (easy enough to do with a right click on the Panel/Taskbar, invoking Add to Panel), all weirdness, plus boot sluggishness, disappeared completely, and as of right now, it remains snappy and happy.

Then I realized my own main machine, wth 32 gigs of memory, was also just a hair slow at bootup, and once in a while bogs down, but I work it pretty hard and always figured it was me, pushing things just a bit farther than they might need to be pushed. Checked for a zombie, and yep, there it was, and yep, removing MintMenu and replacing it with Compact Menu completely eradicated it. Several reboots have clearly shown an improvement in boot time immediately following that change in menu. I just got finished working it REALLY hard, with multiple heavy-load programs running simultaneously, and it seemed just fine throughout.

What's going on?

I have no idea.

I'm not a code guy. Not by a million miles. But I *am* a pattern-recognition guy, and this particular pattern is loud and clear now that I've learned how to look for it.

So I'm tossing this bit of information out there for anyone who's mystified by this thing, and advise dumping MintMenu and replacing it with something else.

But why does MintMenu do this? And what, precisely, IS this?

I do not know.

But I'd love to find out.

[1000]

You can check which system you have

Code: Select all

inxi -Fxxxrz

You can check if there is a new version of the system.
https://www.linuxmint.com/download.php

You can check the newer system on virtualbox.
If the problem does not occur, maybe the problem may have been fixed.

You can check source code / ask / check on virtualbox
https://github.com/linuxmint/mintmenu/i ... +is%3Aopen