10 Feb 2023, 01:03 by borde...@tutanota.com:
> I was trying to fill out a PDF form on Okular and my system started crawling
> to halt on text fields until it locked up completely. SSD stayed solid on (so
> God knows how many write cycles it gluttoned), fan went into overdrive trying
> to keep the circuitry from frying, and the computer completely froze. I
> couldn't even SSH in to shut down programs because my frozen computer
> couldn't spare any resources to authenticate remote access. The only log
> entries indicating that something was amiss was:
>
> boinc[1409]: 10-Feb-2023 00:22:44 [---] Suspending computation - CPU is busy
> boinc[1409]: 10-Feb-2023 00:22:57 [---] Resuming computation
>
> Followed by a 10-minute gap in all logs until I hard-rebooted the system.
>
> So unless I missed something in one of the logs, there's nothing anyone can
> do about this other than note for posterity that KDE and Linux still have
> systemic design flaws. Rogue apps can still cripple the system without
> leaving any evidence whatsoever of what went wrong. And until it leaves
> evidence, there's no way to identify the bugs. Just frustrated users and lost
> data when you can't save what you're working on.
>
> Maybe a doctoral student is working on these design issues so this doesn't
> happen. If not, there should be.
>
> Vent over. Thank you for reading.
>
Supplemental to rant, which may be more productive.
There's a grave problem with how Okular processes PDF forms. Simple,
short-answer text entry has ballooned a simple 1 MB file into a 1.2 GB file.
This would explain (but not excuse) the excessive CPU and hard-drive usage. It
probably also maxed out the RAM and caused the system to freeze.
Workaround: avoid using Okular to complete PDF forms at all costs!!!
