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I've been an Ubuntu fan for many years, and have had no issues to speak of so far, but since I've bought a new laptop, I've run into an issue that I can't figure out how to deal with.

After about 2-3 hours of sustained usage, my computer irrevocably locks up completely. It starts running slowly for a few minutes, having some stutter and other issues, and eventually the entire system just freezes.

I've been able to capture a screen of my iotop when the problem is occuring, which seems to be the issue. top is showing nothing out of the ordinary, except a steadily increasing load. Please note that this is the last I saw anything on my screen change, after this it was completely frozen.

iotop

I'm quite out of my depth. Since none of the programs I'm running seem to be the culprit specifically, I can't really uninstall something and be done.

The system in question is a laptop with the following specs:

Intel Core i7 620M 2,66GHz
Quadro FX 880M
4GB DDR3
7200rpm 320GB

How could I fix (or find) this issue?

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  • But can you try to correlate your problem to a particular application? I've found I need to watch LibreOffice Calc carefully.
    – user25656
    Jan 24, 2014 at 12:43
  • I'll try to shut it down next time I see the symptoms. It does not appear to be using excessive CPU, Memory or IO. Though I'm not sure it would even be reading from disk in that situation, considering I wasn't doing anything with it.
    – Aeolun
    Jan 24, 2014 at 12:46
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    Looks like you are out of ram and swapping like mad.
    – psusi
    Jan 24, 2014 at 14:41
  • Hmm, anything I can do about that except use less programs or buy/install more RAM? How would I prevent for example chrome from eating up all available ram?
    – Aeolun
    Jan 24, 2014 at 15:58
  • Try monitor "Res+Swap" memory, Use top press f add "USED" field then use > to sort by "USED" field. It could be memory leak on a tool or browser 3rd party plugins.
    – user.dz
    Jan 29, 2014 at 15:52

1 Answer 1

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Apparently psusi was correct, and I was swapping like mad. I managed it by closing chrome tabs as soon as I noticed the symptoms and limiting the memory consumption of some programs I had running (as far as was possible).

Eventually I figured out a better solution. The real culprit was likely that my system did not have any swap partition (for some reason not automatically created during installation). Now that I've created one everything seems to be fine.

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