I’m using an XPS 13 9350 with 16GB of RAM and the Intel Graphics 540. I am using Fedora KDE spin. When I am using computer, either randomly or when I start a program, my computer will slow down and quickly fully freeze. In this state, the only thing I can do is shut it down. Is there any way to make it so that a program is killed, or something else that doesn’t fully stop my system?
systemd-oomd?
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Ctrl + Alt + F[1-0]to access other TTYs which might still be responsive even if your desktop environment is unresponsive. Pull uptop/htopand ID the problematic process to kill. -
Agree with using an oom killer.
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Do you need more swap? Can use swap file if expanding swap partition is problematic.
Slows down then freezes sure sounds like an out of memory situation, so to add to yours here they might actually want less swap. Sometimes you would rather hit the oom killer sooner instead of waiting on swap to fill.
Ideally login via SSH from another machine to figure out what is using the memory (hopefully the system is responsive enough for SSH), and if it is your critical programs causing the problem then you should consider a memory upgrade.
Yeah, try pressing Alt+[PrintScreen, F] to invoke the OOM killer. It kills the memory-hoggingest process, usually the web browser.
Fedora documentation says this sysrq functionality may be disabled by default. You can enable it once by typing at a terminal: echo 1 | sudo tee /proc/sys/kernel/sysrq or permanently with echo 'kernel.sysrq = 1' | sudo tee /etc/sysctl.d/90-sysrq.conf
If it turns out that memory overconsumption is the problem, you can sometimes fix this lag by disabling swap. 16GB is easily enough RAM to do all normal desktop things.
When I was but a lad, I learned the phrase “raising skinny elephants is utterly boring.” At my first job where I had a messenger (and thus could set a status message), I set this to display.
I was chastised because the leadership didn’t know what it meant, but thought it might be offensive. I don’t know whom they thought I might offend; one of the many skinny elephants on the team?
I was too nervous to set it again for several subsequent jobs, but eventually I got in a pretty technical one and displayed the message there. Not only did no one express offense, but I actually taught it to someone who put it to use when a mission critical server died.
I don’t have advice to offer but depending on the program you are using, it might be autosaving your work to a temporary file, for example vim does this by default.
You could look into settings for autosaving or temporary files in your programs.
That used to happen to me A LOT. Right now it only happens because I have a faulty RAM that I’m planning to replace very soon, but before that, I think the CPU was overheated and it forcefully rebooted my laptop, at least that was my impression by the logs at boot.
After a long time of debugging, I decided to, first, disable hibernation to see if that was a problem, then I disabled CPU boost and I think that was the cause of overheating, since, for some reason, my distro decided that it was a good idea to use CPU boost for any common task and it caused overheating.
I haven’t had any problems not related to faulty RAM since then lol
