How can I track down the problem?

I had to switch back to XFCE4 because working with E seems unreliable at this point.. is this only my problem or anyone experiences similar issues?

Are there any VERBOSE or DEBUG functionalities or symbols I can build into E ? I cannot see anything like this in FreeBSD's Port but I can add one :-)

cederom, you should begin with full uninstall E and EFL, port version of EFL is really outdated. Then you should download the last versions from enlightenment.org (or checkout from Enlightenment git) and build both EFL and E from sources.
I'm on git versions (dated some months ago) on FreeBSD 11.2. It's stable, I'm using it every day ~12hrs by day without freezes. I tested everything on FreeBSD 12 too without problems.
I did not (yet) tested the last released version of EFL.
You can ask for help in maillist if you have problems with build.

Thank you Peter! Enlightenment really rox! Just as my beloved FreeBSD! This is something really really new and the design is simply amazing.. really reminds me of the old good Unix or even Amiga times! :-)

Will try to build the latest version of E + EFL.. if that works will even maybe update the port itself.. but maybe its also a good time for a release if lots of fixes are implemented already? :-)

Best regards from Polska :-)
Tomek

not really :-( some issues that i have noticed:

1. ui hangs but mouse moves. sometimes after several minutes things get back to normal sometimes not.
2. window switcher / selector is buggy. almost always with virtualbos running it cannot switch back to other windows and does not show windows on the list while switching with Ctrl+Tab. this is critical as i have to restart session and interrupt my work.

that never happens on the same machines running xfce4 or lxqt..

Me too, sometimes I have problems with window switcher. It does not show the list, but only the next window icon & name. But I don't need to restart the session, the next invoking the switcher is normally correct.
And UI does not hang for me with the last versions of E/EFL.

one constant error that shows up at the console tells to: eina_btlog << EOF EOF.
sometimes it tells the resource is null os nonexistent. dont have it right now. maybe will try to catch and upload here so you have more detailed information..

For me I've found a relatively reliable testcase for this: shellementary. When I play a video, have a browser open and a system load roughly equal to the number of cpu cores, e hangs for up to 5 seconds when opening it the first time. So it seems either e or Xorg is waiting for the creation of this window, but shellementary sometimes takes too long (maybe on memory init?)

shellementary --info --text="bla"

testing a bit more, this script is very effective for stopping e for up to 5 seconds for me. First send a via notify-send which returns immediately, start date and then shellementary. Needs a bit higher load and a hardware accelerated video playing. Browsers like Firefox and Chromium are helpful as well. Restarts after 900 seconds which seems enough to purge the kernel cache of shellementary and its librarys.

I've checked load, was at 2 with 2 cores, ~823 MB of ram free, 212 MB of swap used and radeontop reported 65% usage of my ATI card.

#!/bin/sh

function testd()
{
        i=1
        notify-send 'testd' --icon=dialog-information
        date
        shellementary --info --text="testd $i" 2> /dev/null
        ((i+=1))
        sleep 900
        testd
}

testd