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I'm running some memory intensive calculations on Ubuntu 13.04. I have 8 GB of RAM, and a swap partition with the same amount of memory. The hard disk and swap partition are encrypted.

› free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          7663       3773       3890          0        151       2099
-/+ buffers/cache:       1522       6141
Swap:         7863          0       7863

I've watched what happens several times in resource monitor. The swap is at zero when the process starts. The memory gradually fills up, and when RAM features about 99%, the computer freezes with high IO wait on the hard disk.

I've read several other Ask Ubuntu questions, and tried changing vm.min_free_kbytes and vm.swappiness as recommended here, but it didn't work. What should I do?

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  • I've had similar issue while swappiness at value of 5. I've changed that to 10 and the system is no more freezing, however it can choke after a while from startup and Chrome surfing (4 GB RAM here). I guess in my case the system was unable to engage swap from a point of too high RAM usage, Yours of 99% may be fatal.
    – Esamo
    Nov 4, 2014 at 22:48
  • I was having a similar issue. One solution that worked is disabling the swap entirely. This way when the program I was running used up all the RAM the os just sends it a kill signal, this is a workable solution. When I went to comment out the cryptswap line in /etc/fstab I saw there were 2 lines, one that was already commented out. I tried uncommenting that line and that appeared to fix the swap issue, swap started working again. The two lines looked like this #/dev/mapper/ubuntu--vg-swap_1 none swap sw 0 0 /dev/mapper/cryptswap1 none swap sw 0 0 Apr 3, 2018 at 20:34

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