Question

0

Ubuntu 20 freezes when swap nears limit, but there's free memory available

rated 0 times [ 0] [ 0] / answers: 1 / hits: 1128 / 2 Years ago, sat, january 15, 2022, 2:30:29

I'm running Ubuntu 20.04 on a Lenovo X1C 7th Gen with 16GB RAM. The swap is set to 2GiB.

Just after entering edit mode on a photo in Google Photos (in Firefox), which I'm pretty sure has a serious memory leak (because I've seen it increase memory consumption and slow down the system), the system froze like this:

It stayed like that for a good 3 minutes, with the mouse cursor barely dragging along (good luck taking a screenshot). Eventually it recovered. As you can see, there was plenty of RAM available.

What was going on, and how can I prevent this? /proc/sys/vm/swappiness is the default, 60.

Answers

Only authorized users can answer the question. Please sign in first, or register a free account.

irtuallyefu

Add To Favorites

Follow

Total Points: 429

Total Questions: 97

Total Answers: 119

Location: Hong Kong

Member since Tue, Oct 19, 2021

3 Years ago

irtuallyefu questions

1 Updating Azure Data Studio

Wed, Apr 19, 23, 14:25, 1 Year ago

1 How to set as default Performance mode on Ubuntu 20.04 instead of Powersave?

Thu, Jul 8, 21, 13:56, 3 Years ago

1 Xubuntu 20:04 (focal): IPKernelApp|Error|No such comm target registered|jupyter.widget.version

Sat, Jan 28, 23, 17:31, 1 Year ago

1 NVIDIA not working on 19.10

Fri, Jul 9, 21, 19:52, 3 Years ago

1 How do I get a Bluetooth speaker to auto-connect at login?

Tue, Oct 5, 21, 15:07, 3 Years ago

View All

answered 2 Years ago iriousutur · Accepted Answer

Since I've set swappiness to 10, I've never had this problem. Also, as Jons suggested, it makes sense to have much more swap, and I don't understand why Linux Mint for example, creates a tiny 1GB swap file on a system with 16GB RAM.