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I have 1GB RAM in my notebook (HP Compaq 6735s), but the video card is using 256MB, so I'm left with 768MB RAM.

However, whenever my system starts using more than 85% of memory, it becomes unusable. It literally stops. With a swapfile it slowly wakes up, once it has freed enough RAM, but without it, my system freezes.

Is this caused by system misconfiguration or is it normal behaviour?

Thanks.

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  • It's unlikely that your video card is using 256MB of RAM; more likely that it has 256MB of video memory on the card. It is odd that your system freezes at 85% memory usage, that definitely isn't normal behavior. Mine doesn't lock up until I'm using 100% of RAM. Although I'm curious what program you used to check your RAM usage. Also I should not that 1GB of RAM is probably not enough to run the default Ubuntu distribution (uses Unity). I recommend switching to Lubuntu (uses LXDE) or Xubuntu (uses XFCE).
    – TheSchwa
    Nov 17, 2014 at 20:44
  • @TheSchwa, I'm quite sure that I have 1GB of RAM installed, but only 768MB is usable. I have an AMD ATI Radeon (Mobility) HD 3200, which, according to this site, uses shared memory I'm on LXLE 64 bit (Lubuntu distro with themes on twirks, but the same behaviour occured on Lubuntu, Ubuntu and Debian. On a 32 bit distro, it freezed when 500MB was used. Dec 1, 2014 at 15:35
  • I did not realize that there are graphics chips that share RAM; good to know. What utility are you using to check your RAM usage and max RAM? I'll have to look further into how the kernel and drivers treat the memory space, but I wonder if whatever utility you're using is reporting "85%" out of the full 1GB instead of "85%" out of the 768MB. (I realize 768 is 75% of 1024, but it's possible theres some weird memory mapping going on behind the scenes that messes up those usage statistics).
    – TheSchwa
    Dec 2, 2014 at 3:25
  • I use free -m *wink* I calculated the 85% myself, from what memory was in use at that moment. Dec 5, 2014 at 17:43

2 Answers 2

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Is such behavior normal or not depends on how it freezes: if it's freezes due to failure of one of the services or kernel — this is a bug, but if it's freezes only for limited time (like 20 minutes, until some processes will get into swap, and other get out of swap) — this is expected behavior.

I don't think usual Ubuntu distributive can be normally run on such hardware (although Canonical claim, that it will run on 768 MB of RAM). I recommend one or more of following:

  1. Install Ubuntu distributive designed for low-end systems, e.g. Lubuntu.

  2. Use lightweight desktop environment, like LXDE (it is preinstalled in Lubuntu, but you can also install it in usual Ubuntu).

  3. Configure zRam. All you need is to install zram-config package and reboot.

  4. Upgrade your system: SSD drive will give you notebook new life. 1 GB more of RAM would great too.

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  • I tried Ubuntu for a month, then I gave up. I moved to Lubuntu, with which I stayed for half a year, and now I'm on LXLE, and considering trying Arch with LXQt. My system uses ~200-250 on idle, so I can run things normally. But thanks about zram. Will try it. Dec 1, 2014 at 15:21
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It is normal this to happen, because when the RAM usage gets higher than the RAM itself, the system starts to swap to disk, which makes the system very slow, and in your case unusable.

If you want to run Ubuntu smoothly, think about upgrading your PC to atleast 2GB of RAM.

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  • Yes, I know that I should have more RAM, and that the system swaps unused data onto the disk, but I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about that, without the presence of a swap file/partition, the system lags when the RAM is ~85%, although it should when it's 100%. It also starts lagging down and swapping at ~80%, although it should start at ~90-95%. Dec 1, 2014 at 15:24

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