(I am currently using Ubuntu 14.04 LTS, GNOME environment)
tl;dr How can I force more memory swapping (swappiness already at 100)?
I have recently been experiencing a lot of system freezes/crashes. Often when accessing busy websites. It has been happening so much I have htop loaded on my tty, so I can switch to it and terminate my browser (as GUI does not respond). However, sometimes I need to use REISUB.
I thought GNOME might work better than Unity, as my Debian system has no problems, and it did to a point, but I am still running high on memory, and getting freezes.
I looked at my free -m
today, and noticed my swap was showing 0 used. Output:
total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 1821 1673 148 221 40 643
-/+ buffers/cache: 989 832
Swap: 1933 0 1933
I did a temporary swappiness to 100 (sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=100
). The results were still the same (0 being used even after running to near max system memory usage).
I looked at this answer:
How do I see if system is swapping?
unfortunately as I am writing this, my system went into updates, and my packages are locked, so I cannot install this (sar
) nor am I sure what package this is part of, in order to give another Output.
I have looked in the fstab, and my swap partition is being used correctly.
# swap was on /dev/sda3 during installation
UUID=10fdfed2-1fde-4d9f-a8f1-3d2376b0ffcc none swap sw 0 0
I am using a shared swap partition with my Debian OS (dual boot, separate partition, shared swap). But the partition is not locked, and I did a quick swapoff ...
, swapon ...
, and swapon -s
to see if it would possibly recognize my swap and start swapping. It appears to still be at low swapping (84 hooray), but my memory usage is at 90%+ usage. With around 13% memory usage by Chromium, 17% by GNOME.
I don't care if I am forced into slowness, but I can't be forced into full system freeze (can't access TTY, can't do Ctrl+Alt+Backspace, only Alt+SysReq R,E,I,S,U,B)
I had the same issue with 12.04 LTS (pre-packaged), but have recently gone to 14.04 LTS.
Bottom Line: How can I force swapping further, and/or control processes before they cause system stability issues?
(Side Note: Debian works fine, except for mouse touchpad issue)
Output of dmesg | grep error
:
[ 26.646691] EXT4-fs (sda2): re-mounted. Opts: errors=remount-ro
This is Ubuntu Partition. Same error on Debian Partition except sda7.
dmesg
for errors? – Timothy Martin Aug 21 '14 at 17:56dmesg
– No Time Aug 21 '14 at 19:52smartmontools
and then runsmartctl -a /dev/sda
? – Renan Aug 21 '14 at 19:56+/- buffers/cache
line to get the actual amount of ram used by your system. See http://linuxatemyram.com/ for an explanation. Your getting freezes is not because you have low ram. It may be bad ram, or something wrong with video card or cpu or similar. – pqnet Aug 21 '14 at 22:24cat /proc/sys/vm/vfs_cache_pressure
? – pqnet Aug 22 '14 at 05:21