My laptop has Intel B960 (2.2GHz x 2) with 4 GB RAM. OS is Ubuntu 12.04 with all updates to current date.
I am getting a peculiar issue since about 2 weeks - when I browse a HTML5/CSS3 website in Chrome, sometimes (randomly) the system freezes - mouse, keyboard nothing seems to work. Ctrl-Alt-Del wouldn't work. The mouse pointer moves but clicking doesn't do anything. There is no such issue in Firefox. Only Chrome on Ubuntu has the problem.
As nothing seemed to work, I was doing a cold restart (power switch).
Then, today I referred to this troubleshooting wiki: What should I do when Ubuntu freezes? and pressed Ctrl-Alt-F1, which worked to get the TTY1 session. Logged in as root and checked memory usage with top. Noticed that one instance of Chrome was using over 700 MB and another instance of Chrome was randomly coming up with usage of over 900 MB.
I pressed Ctrl-Alt-F7 to check the graphical desktop and surprisingly the graphical session is working now. I am writing this in that same graphical session that froze earlier.
Have written this Q&A specifically for folks who get this "Chrome freeze on Ubuntu".
