I have the Lenovo R61 Thinkpad with Ubuntu 18.04. It has 4GB memory, Samsung SSD 860 EVO 500GB with 9GBs swap partition, Core™2 Duo CPU T7500 @ 2.20GHz × 2 and Intel® 965GM (CL) graphics.
Soon after I starts using memory heavy software like GIMP or Google Map for a while, all of sudden, the swapping begins and it freezes up with the hardware led light continuously flickering. The clock sometimes does not advance for more than 20 to 30 minutes, and sometimes it crashes with the blank screen and restarts by itself. I do not think it uses up all 9GB swap space.
I tried to solve this myself by researching, but so far all the suggestions on the web failed. Previous, it had the Kingston SSD, and I learned that it has a firmware problem with Linux, so I changed to Samsung SSD. But still the freeze problem persists.
Is this normal because of my old hardware or faulty hardware? Or is my software configuration or setting not correct? Where can I start looking further?
Thank you very much.
PS
Here is the output after I changed the swap partition to 32GB.
Here is another one after I use up some memory.
Update after further testing.
I think I may have found the cause of the freeze. With the increased 32GB swap partition, if I open lots images in GIMP and uses Googlemap extensively, the memory usage goes up to 3.6GB and swap to 4.1GB usage, and the system becomes sluggish and the mouse movement jerky. But it does not freeze. However, if I open a few images with the image viewer in the Files(nautilus) by double clicking an image(it may be after several images opening), the system freezes with or without the blank screen. Last night, it went blank screen and logged me off after 5 to 10 minutes freeze. I though it was a restart, but it was not from looking at the uptime.
This morning, with memory at 3.1GB usage and swap at 3.2GB usage, after double clicking a image in the Files, the screen went blank for almost 2 hours and I had to restart it manually. Other image viewer did not cause the freeze. Only the image viewer somehow triggers this freeze, if I recall the past freezes. If the memory usage is light, I do not think this happens.
So, is there any way to capture the snapshots of what is going on in the background when I open the image viewer, so that I can forward this to the image viewer programmers for review. There may be a bug with the program.
Thank you.