this is the first time in many years of my GNU/Linux journey that I saw a BSOD. on my office machine BTW. personal machine has never crashed even once.
the crash was due to 100% RAM and swap usage.
image description:
a mobile-clicked photo of a laptop screen. the background is full black with a sad computer image in the middle. the text below it reads: “Oh no! something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. Please log out and try again.”
just below it is a small button with the text “log out”
100% RAM is a huge pain on Linux. I have a widget in my taskbar that always shows my RAM usage so I can tell if I’m about to get doinked
Same, what usually spikes yours to 100%?
Up until yesterday I would’ve said “Firefox” (because I hoard tabs), but it turns the real answer was “Firefox running as a Snap.”
(A failed update screwed up my Snap installation, which finally gave me the kick I needed to quit procrastinating and excise it from my system once and for all. I’m running Firefox installed via apt package from Mozilla’s PPA, and now – with the same number of tabs open – my system is hovering around 8 GB memory usage, when before it was constantly bouncing off the 32 GB redline.)
Firefox somewhat regularly crashes or freezes up my laptop (16Gb) due to memory usage and I’m running the default Arch package. I ended up installing a memory watchdog that kills processes when they start using too much. Although I do hoard tabs.
I mean there is a kernel OOM killer and a systemd service that acts well before that. Do you not use systemd?
I do use systemd. I pretty much run stock EndeavorOS
Carelessly running too many programs and not having much RAM.
When I get my Framework 16, I’ll either get 64 or 128GBs of RAM. It’s so cheap nowadays, the only thing stopping me from getting more is simply the increased time to go to sleep and wake up.
Tends to be mem leak in bad code for me
Yeah i only get near 100% when I’m doing a lot of virtualization or running nyx for a long time since there’s a memory leak in there.
Wouldn’t of thought nyx would be unstable.
Not unstable nor unreliable, just a bit buggy. Every so often you gotta do a quick
qqto exit and wait up to 5 minutes for it to let go of the ram. On occasion I’ve had to terminate the process as it was doing something wacky.I have 16 GB and it feels like a lot. I run virtual machines and I still have leftovers
Manipulating gigantic log files can do it for me.
You know your in for a good time when notepad give a warning before hand, ive run into this before filling my 32gb of ram.
Doesn’t Linux have some sort of Page File?
Its not a dedicated file usually as you can setup a swap partition.
Technically you can create a fixed size pagefile in your disk and mount it as swap workout repartitioning. But Linux doesn’t use swap much regardless of method.
It only uses swap under memory pressure. You can configure your swappyness if you want it to be more aggressive
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same! I have a nice icon next to it on my i3 status bar.
There are automated memory killers that should avoid this. I’m using nohang, but systemd also has some module for this.