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jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

[solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Hey folks,

When I run out of memory using Chromium (though it could happen with others I presume), my hard drive starts going out of control and everything freezes and I have to do a forced shut down.

It's not like there's a log file I can check so I'm really not sure what I can do. Any ideas?

Thanks

Last edited by jpjenkins (2017-01-15 21:44:26)

ewaller

Administrator

From: Pasadena, CA

Registered: 2009-07-13

Posts: 20,715

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Sounds like thrashing

How much physical memory do you have?  Is this something that happens with time ?  It could be a memory leak.
Or is it a matter of having too many tabs open?  Or a site in particular that causes it?

The command free will tell you about free RAM and swap space.

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jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Hi ewaller. I have 8gb, should be more than enough. It can be too many tabs but often, even when I close the tabs the memory doesn't get flushed so I have to close the browser and reopen, otherwise, even 2 tabs could send it into misery.

I have a small swap space, this is what the command free -h brings up:

                       total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           7.7G        4.2G        522M        1.2G        3.1G        2.1G
Swap:          511M          0B        511M

Anything unusual? I'm also using psd, perhaps that's causing issues?

jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Thrashing - "in a constant state of paging, rapidly exchanging data in memory for data on disk".

Yeah, that would about cover it, once the memory runs out the hard drive stresses out.

jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

After searching around I noticed someone else had mentioned that it may be an issue with the intel driver. I thought this was unlikely but followed the advice and set my gfx to use uxa in a xorg conf. After rebooting, I've tried to break it but it's just not breaking anymore. I'm monitoring everything in htop and it's using far less memory and releasing it without problems, I had 20 tabs open - facebook/reddit/arstechnica/youtube etc. and it was hovering around 4.5gig, closed a few, the memory released no problem and now I have 7 tabs at 3gig. This is unprecedented.

However, I'm still suspicious. I'll keep monitoring it and see what happens

jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Hmmm... this is new:

/usr/lib/xorg-server/Xorg -nolisten tcp :0 vt1 -auth /tmp/serverauth.3b........

In htop, consistently using around 2% CPU. Should I be concerned?

Thanks

ugjka

Member

From: Latvia

Registered: 2014-04-01

Posts: 1,962

Website

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

You can get rid of the intel driver althoughether and use Xorg's built in modesetting driver

jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Will this reduce performance?

WorMzy

Administrator

From: Scotland

Registered: 2010-06-16

Posts: 13,691

Website

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

jpjenkins, please don't multipost. If you are the last person to post, use the edit button to add extra information.

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ugjka

Member

From: Latvia

Registered: 2014-04-01

Posts: 1,962

Website

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Will this reduce performance?

Maybe, it uses glamor, but even Fedora is going to ditch the intel driver http://www.phoronix.com/scan.php?page=n … DDX-Switch

Last edited by ugjka (2017-01-10 16:37:13)

infinarchy

Banned

Registered: 2016-09-19

Posts: 73

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

empty

Last edited by infinarchy (2017-11-04 21:40:40)

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 25,425

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

It seems to have gone under the radar and you also simply mentioned it at the side, but I think psd might well be the key element here. And would also explain why the ram doesn't get flushed on simply closing a tab. Can you try without? Chrome isn't light on resources as is (depending on the page its not uncommon to have one single tab eat 2GB by its lonesome, without psd putting the whole cache that gets generated on RAM as well).

Edit: Ah seems to have been solved more or less, nevermind then

Last edited by V1del (2017-01-12 12:42:05)

jpjenkins

Member

Registered: 2014-03-24

Posts: 104

Re: [solved]Using Chromium inevitably leads to thrashing with 8gb ram

Thanks for your responses. I've yet to have another issue, very strange intel driver issue it seems. I'll experiment with removing it completely in the near future.

Marked as solved.