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Hi, I have a x64 system with 6 GB ram and a quad core CPU being used as a desktop. I have zero swap space primarily because I use btrfs and I figured 6 GB would be enough. Everything works fine with this configuration most of the time but when I approach 97% memory use (often because of Firefox) I often get a condition where all 4 CPU cores approach 100% and the whole system locks up. You can also usually hear the disks thrashing like crazy when this occurs. Half the time it's so bad I have to use SYSRQ-REISUB to get out of it. The other half I can finally kill something off after 5-10 minutes of trying. It's very annoying as you might imagine.
My question is there any way I can say reserve 300-500 MB of memory for critical kernel level tasks and other things in order to help prevent this lockup condition from occurring? Something like this?
Last edited by davidm (2014-04-17 15:20:34)
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Tips: use sysrq+f to invoke an oom killer; use a swapfile; ulatencyd might help; disabling overcommit might help.
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Tips: use sysrq+f to invoke an oom killer; use a swapfile; ulatencyd might help; disabling overcommit might help.
Thanks. good information. I think I will keep the sysrq+f in mind for next time and look into the other solutions. I have room for another 2GB (possibly more as some report this workstation can take up to 16 GB) of ram to upgrade so maybe I'll just take it to 8 GB anyway.
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