Hi guys! I have a rather beefy machine. AMD Ryzen 7700, 32GB DDR5, GPU 7800XT 16GB, several NVME drives for OS, general data, games. And yet…after a while it becomes completely unresponsive. Mouse freezes, keyboard doesn’t key anything, and the screen gets completely frozen. Meanwhile the disk led gets full activity, almost constantly red. So…While this might be crazy pagination turning the system to a crawl (I have an 8GB swapfile), I want to be able to determine what’s going on. Is there a way I can check any log, or enable any kind of logging that would tell me what happened on the seconds before it became completely unresponsive? Who takes all my memory??
Normal situations where this happens:
Firefox open, multiple windows, lots of tabs. Maybe ~5-8GB of RAM.
Virtmanager running a Windows VM, running a work remote desktop…4GB of RAM
Steam…1GB of RAM
Thunderbird, Deluge, Telegram, Whatsapp…Not much more really.
This shouldn’t even come close to the RAM capacity of this machine. And yet…it really looks like it suffocates without memory. How can I check for issues?
Neon doesn’t force you to actually update the ubuntu it’s built on unless you manually do it iirc. Update your shit and report back.
Once you decide not to try that, top, btop atop or htop can tell you the amount of ram you’re using. They will all also tell you how your disk writes are doing.
It doesn’t sound like you have a ram issue, it sounds like you have a disk issue. First and foremost, once you’ve verified that you have plenty of memory available using a tool described above, expand your windows vm to 8gb. Windows would aggressively page if it had only 4gb and windows in a vm will also aggressively page when it only has 4gb, except it has to go through kvm to access those qcows.
It sounds like you have way too many tabs open. Close some and see if that helps you out. You can highlight a bunch of them by selecting one and ctrl-shift clicking on another one to get every tab in between. Right click and add to bookmarks then close them.
Next, use spinrite with I think a level 3 scan on all your nvme drives. It shaves a write cycle off the top (you have hundreds of thousands at the very least) but in return makes everything fast again. Flash memory becomes less responsive as read cycles on a block pile up until it’s rewritten.