Fedora 27, fully affected. New to linux a couple of years ago, I decided to try 'live' versions on two Win 7 laptops (4GB Ram each).
Debian 8.6 first, then 8.7, 9.2 and 9.3. Ubuntu 14,15,16 Fedora 26, currently 27 DE's: Xfce, GNOME, Unity, Mate, Cinnamon, always the same problem. (XFce hold up the longest; less memory intensive) Manifested when multiple tabs are opened on the web browser (10,15,20,25, depending on the browser and version and how memory intensive it is): FF52 up to 61 developers (the newer ones eat up memory faster) Chrome, Chromium. I banged my head against the wall for 1.5 years before I stumbled upon this thread, thinking it was bad memory (many days of running memtest), or other hardware (but in both laptops? Couldn't be). The system will suddenly SEIZE up if you're close to memory capacity. If I am close, and I take my eyes off the USB drive for an instant and it begins to flash non-stop, once it goes beyond 10 seconds I likely cannot drop to the console I keep opened to kill the Firefox ps. Maybe it will respond after an hour, 2 or 4 hours, usually not. Time to power off. Now I keep gnome-system-monitor opened and watch the memory approach 96% and restart the browser, and in the case of Debian/Ubuntu on X11, restart gnome-shell (which has a major leak problem also). On one laptop I did make a separate partition for Deb 8.7 with a swap space. Same thing happens. I will observe the HD light come on and stay solid. That's the end. I was shocked to find this bug and that it has existed for more than 10 years. It makes this almost an nonviable platform and I'm loving Linux otherwise. Sorry for the rant, there was 1.5 years of frustration built into it. Thanks for all the work the dev's do, I know it aint easy. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Kernel Packages, which is subscribed to linux in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/159356 Title: System freeze on high memory usage Status in linux package in Ubuntu: Confirmed Status in linux package in Arch Linux: New Status in Fedora: Confirmed Bug description: I run a batch matlab job server here at my lab, running Dapper 6.06 (for the LTS). One of the users has submitted a very memory-consuming job, which successfully crashes the server. Upon closer inspection, the crash happens like this: 1. I run matlab with the given file (as an ordinary, unpriveleged user) 2. RAM usage quickly fills up 3. Once the RAM meter hits 100%, the system freezes: All SSH connections freeze up, and while switching VTs directly on the machine works, no new processes run - so one can't log in, or do anything if he is logged in. (Sometimes typing doesn't work at all) Note that the swap - while 7 gigs of it are available - is never used. (The machine has 7 gigs of RAM as well) I've tried the same on my Gutsy 32-bit box, and there was no system freezeup - matlab simply notified that the system was out of memory. However, it did this once memory was 100% in use - and still, swap didn't get used at all! (Though it is mounted correctly and shows up in "top" and "free"). So first thing's first - I'd like to eliminate the crash issue. I suppose I could switch the server to 32-bit, but I think that would be a performance loss, considering that it does a lot of heavy computation. There is no reason, however, that this should happen on a 64-bit machine anyway. Why does it? WORKAROUND: Enabling DMA in the BIOS To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/159356/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages Post to : kernel-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~kernel-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp
