Evince only reliably opens PDFs if Evince is started first, hung Evince instance causes system freeze if clicked on

On my machine (see details below) Evince does not open documents as expected, but this depends on the method used. The two methods I mean are: - (A) starting Evince by giving a document as a target (e.g. clicking on the document and using "open with" and "Evince" *or* running evince from the terminal); - (B) starting Evince first, without a document, and then clicking on "open..." in the Evince window *or* dragging a document on top of an already open Evince window (this opens another Evince window with the new document). Method A (mostly) does not work. This results in a hung process, which I can see with pgrep and via an icon in the dock. htop shows that these processes use nearly no CPU and nearly no memory. I can kill these processes normally. However, if I click on the icons for these Evince instances in the dock, my system immediately and completely freezes (I cannot open a tty), and the solution is a forced restart via the power button. The exceptions: Method A sometimes works. I found it (mostly but *maybe* not always? I am unsure now) works on a small (0.5 MB) PDF which *has only images and no text*. I found it would *sometimes* also work on a medium sized (4 MB) PDF with both image and text. In this case, a window would sometimes also appear with the UI for viewing PDFs, but the PDF would not appear. Other times, the process would hang or the PDF would open normally. I found it would not work on a larger PDF (6 MB) with both images and text, and I never got it to work on a small (0.2 MB) PDF with only text and no images. I also tried a small (0.2 MB) .ps image, and could not open it with method A. Method B (mostly) functions normally. The exception: Method B sometimes does not work if a hung process is already running. That is, if a hung process is running, I can get an empty Evince window open, but using "open..." or dragging a document onto the window sometimes opened the document and sometimes not. My machine: - Ubuntu 20.04.6, 64 bit - Windowing system: Wayland - 64 GiB of memory - 11th gen Intel processor - Some onboard graphics: Mesa Intel XE (TGL GT2) - 2 TB SSD space, nowhere near full Additionally, I'll add that this was not always a problem. I used to be able to use Evince totally normally. However, at some point in time in the past, this behavior started, and I simply avoided using Evince because I couldn't identify what might have changed. Some more diagnostics: I tried running strace on a hung Evince process. I read this could be helpful, but I don't understand any of the output:

strace: Process 12102 attached
restart_syscall() = 1
write(5, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8)         = 8
recvmsg(11, {msg_name=NULL, msg_namelen=0, msg_iov=[{iov_base="l\4\1\1\21\0\0\0\373\5\0\0\205\0\0\0\1\1o\0\30\0\0\0/org/a11"..., iov_len=2048}], msg_iovlen=1, msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC}, MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = 169
write(5, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8)         = 8
recvmsg(11, {msg_namelen=0}, MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
write(5, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8)         = 8
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}], 3, 0) = 1 ([{fd=5, revents=POLLIN}])
read(5, "\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 16)         = 8
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}], 3, -1) = 1 ([{fd=11, revents=POLLIN}])
write(5, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8)         = 8
recvmsg(11, {msg_name=NULL, msg_namelen=0, msg_iov=[{iov_base="l\4\1\1\21\0\0\0\375\5\0\0\205\0\0\0\1\1o\0\30\0\0\0/org/a11"..., iov_len=2048}], msg_iovlen=1, msg_controllen=0, msg_flags=MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC}, MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = 169
write(5, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8)         = 8
recvmsg(11, {msg_namelen=0}, MSG_CMSG_CLOEXEC) = -1 EAGAIN (Resource temporarily unavailable)
write(5, "\1\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 8)         = 8
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}], 3, 0) = 1 ([{fd=5, revents=POLLIN}])
read(5, "\3\0\0\0\0\0\0\0", 16)         = 8
poll([{fd=3, events=POLLIN}, {fd=5, events=POLLIN}, {fd=11, events=POLLIN}], 3, -1

I waited some minutes, and no additional output was written. I also ran netstat because read that could be helpful, but again I don't understand the output.

$ netstat -p | grep 12102
(Not all processes could be identified, non-owned process info
 will not be shown, you would have to be root to see it all.)
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     150817   12102/evince         
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     149214   12102/evince         
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     149075   12102/evince         
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     149074   12102/evince         
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     149213   12102/evince         
unix  3      [ ]         STREAM     CONNECTED     151902   12102/evince

I ran ls -l /proc//fd, again, because I read it could help. On a hung process (12102) and then, after killing this process and using method B on the same PDF (process 15795):

@:~$ ls -l /proc/12102/fd
total 0
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 0 -> /dev/null
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 1 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 10 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 11 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 12 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 13 -> anon_inode:inotify
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 14 -> '/home//.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home (deleted)'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 15 -> '/home//.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home-a9b0a1cb.log (deleted)'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 16 -> /home//Downloads/.pdf
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 2 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 3 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 4 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 5 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 6 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 7 -> '/memfd:wayland-cursor (deleted)'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 8 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:37 9 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
@:~$ ls -l /proc/15795/fd
total 0
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 0 -> /dev/null
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 1 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 10 -> 'socket:'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 102 -> '/home//.local/share/gvfs-metadata/root-5357d137.log (deleted)'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 11 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 12 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 13 -> anon_inode:inotify
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 14 -> '/home//.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home (deleted)'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 15 -> '/memfd:wayland-cursor (deleted)'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 16 -> '/home//.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home-41fe52fb.log (deleted)'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 17 -> /home//Downloads/.pdf
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 2 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 3 -> 'socket:'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 4 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 5 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 6 -> 'socket:'
lr-x------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 60 -> '/home//.local/share/gvfs-metadata/root (deleted)'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 7 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 8 -> 'anon_inode:[eventfd]'
lrwx------ 1   64 Okt 11 18:58 9 -> '/memfd:wayland-cursor (deleted)'

This looks the same to me, except that the latter process has two "wayland cursor" lines. I would appreciate all your suggestions about how to diagnose this. I typically would use Okular for PDFs, but I found Evince tended to work better with PDFs that have large images, and I am starting to view more PDFs of that kind. Also, this problem just utterly perplexes me and I'd like to solve it.