Arch Linux

anaboth

Member

Registered: 2017-10-20

Posts: 2

System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

Every time I try to run anything that uses more RAM, like Android Studio or some games, my system completly freezes and I'm forced to hard reset it, it's the only way to unfreeze.

I'm running arch 64bits, with 4GB of RAM and xfce4 as desktop environment.

cfr

Member

From: Cymru

Registered: 2011-11-27

Posts: 7,132

Re: System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

What do the logs say? How is swap configured? Can you kill X or switch to a tty? What hardware do you have?

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anaboth

Member

Registered: 2017-10-20

Posts: 2

Re: System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

What do the logs say? How is swap configured? Can you kill X or switch to a tty? What hardware do you have?

Hardware:
Dell Vostro 5480
i5 5200U
4GB 1600Mhz
SSD 500GB
NVIDIA 830m

No, I can't kill X or switch to a tty, actualy I can't do anything, it completly freezes.

Just created a partition with 10GB and used mkswap, swapon.

I don't have any log, because of the system freeze, it can't write to any file.

V1del

Forum Moderator

Registered: 2012-10-16

Posts: 21,627

Re: System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

The only viable fix to OOM issues without compromises is to get more RAM, if that isn't a possibility, live with the slowdown, or adjust your workflow so that only one big memory using utility is active at any given time. 4GB of RAM really isn't enough for a lot of bigger things

Last edited by V1del (2017-10-20 11:52:05)

robg

Member

Registered: 2015-03-05

Posts: 218

Re: System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

To figure out what applications are primarily to blame for this behavior see for example this. Also, reading the System Requirements section on https://developer.android.com/studio/index.html, it seems that 4G is a slightly overoptimistic amount of memory to run Android Studio.

seth

Member

Registered: 2012-09-03

Posts: 50,929

Re: System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

@V1del, the systemd should not hard-lock, though.

Also see https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=231083 - could be an actual problem.

@anaboth, does the freeze occur with or without the swap? (your last comment sounds as if you've added swap space "just now" and the freeze happened before)

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catalin.hritcu

Member

From: Paris, France

Registered: 2014-04-27

Posts: 26

Website

Re: System freezing on high usage of RAM/Swap

I'm having similar problems and it seems related to swapping on an LVM volume
(as seth already posted: https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php?id=231083
and also https://bbs.archlinux.org/viewtopic.php … 7#p1758127 )

Last edited by catalin.hritcu (2018-02-18 19:01:20)