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My machine keeps 'freezing' before eventaully logging out with all the programs exiting. This is rather annoying, and I think its because I keep running out of memory. I am not running any custom software, just netbeans, chrome etc. (Stuff I usually run on other ubuntu computers without issue).

For some reason my memory usage is through the roof as seen here, but I can't quite figure out why. Here is a screenshot which may be useful with htop and gnome-system monitor open as user and as root. enter image description here

I notice that my console-kit-daemon is taking up about a gig of 'virtual memory'. Is that normal?

Any tips/advice will be helpful. In the meantime I have ordered 2 x 4 gig ram sticks to try and just throw hardware at the issue.

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  • Does this only happen when you have specific programs running, like chrome? If so, try isolating those programs. (could be a bug, this remembers me of a bug in a screensaver, which ate all your memory and then freezed your pc)
    – R110
    Jun 24, 2013 at 16:29

1 Answer 1

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I see that chromium-browser (your web browser) is using a lot of memory.

With only 1.4GB of memory available you will get into trouble soon with modern browsers and a lot of tabs open, yes. Press Shift+Esc in Chrome/Chromium to see what tab is consuming so much. See also: Chrome suddenly using too much memory, what's wrong?

Simple tips:

  • Keep the amount of tabs low.
  • Uninstall unused browser extensions.
  • Avoid sites using extensions such as Adobe Flash, or use "Click to Play" instead of running all extensions directly.
  • Don't sort on the Virtual Memory column, but on the regular Memory column. (see below for why)

Don't worry about the console-kit-daemon - it's only using 204 KiB of actual memory. The amount of virtual memory assigned is as it says virtual. The process just thinks it has the 1000 MiB of memory available, but isn't using it at the moment, clearly. The kernel will then simply not map any real memory for what isn't used.

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  • I don't think 1.4 GB is not enough for Ubuntu. I have Ubuntu 12.10 running on a laptop with only 1 GB and does never freeze. Under normal conditions, half of the memory is used, and only 2 MB of swap is used.
    – R110
    Jun 24, 2013 at 16:24
  • @R110 I agree, but then you're probably not using Chrome/Chromium with 10+ tabs and all kinds of extension. ;)
    – gertvdijk
    Jun 24, 2013 at 16:25
  • No, I have 2 Firefox windows open, with 10+ tabs.
    – R110
    Jun 24, 2013 at 16:28
  • It's definitely not chromium. Even when I am running nothing (except dropbox and synapse in the background), I am still using way over 1 Gig of memory when you add into the amount of swap being used. I only have this problem on this computer, which makes me think it is something to do with using the AMD a4 APU with the stable driver downloaded from their website: amd-driver-installer-catalyst-13-4-x86.x86_64.run All my other machines are intels with nvidia or just the onboard graphics...
    – Programster
    Jun 24, 2013 at 19:54
  • Screenshot of memory usage when not running any 'real' applications: img96.imageshack.us/img96/9017/kc67.png
    – Programster
    Jun 24, 2013 at 20:03

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