Roy J. Tellason, Sr. wrote: > I don't ordinarily shut this machine down for the most part. Every once in a > while all of my swap partition gets filled up, and then there's this > continuous hard drive activity that I'm assuming is what they mean by > "thrashing". The only option at that point is to get its attention with the > power switch. And then I need to go through a whole routing with bringing up > what I had going, including re-starting virtualbox and the stuff that runs > in it, etc. If I'm lucky then I can get back the windows I had going > before, sometimes I'm not so lucky. A system monitor I run on desktop 4 > always comes up, but on the wrong desktop and I have to move it. > > The "eat all available memory" culprit seems to be firefox. I just need to > look at that system monitor every once in a while and when things start > getting excessive shut firefox down and restart it. Then I don't have the > problem...
There's a kernel feature called the OOM-killer (out of memory) which is supposed to detect when you are running out of memory and select a process to kill. Did you turn it off? It would be a setting in /etc/sysctl.conf or /etc/sysctl.d/* If not, perhaps you have an excessive amount of slow swap for it to be happy? > I'm not sure if I have ntp or something else running here. (Looking...) I > don't see it in my process list. Other likely candidates are systemd-timesync and chrony. -dsr-
