On 6 June 2018 at 15:26, <debian-user-digest-requ...@lists.debian.org> wrote: > Hi. > > On Tue, Jun 05, 2018 at 09:25:25PM -0400, Borden Rhodes wrote: >> During the freeze, hard drive activity goes through the roof. Yes, my >> hard drive is fine and works normally when doing anything else. I also >> don't get these lockups when browsing in Windows. > > That looks like an OOM-killer that's desperately trying to free some RAM. > Or good old 12309 bug. > > Please share the contents of /var/log/kern.log that correspond to the > time of the problem. Any single one will do. > > Reco
Thank you very much for following up, Reco. I had no difficulty triggering a hard drive thrash (thank you, Linotype!), and the problem is definitely memory-related. I managed to stabilise my system by increasing the swap partition. Unfortunately, the hard drive didn't stop thrashing and after an hour I gave up and hard-powered off. I did, however, save this kernel log from 20 minutes into the OOM https://paste.debian.net/1028268/ (link's good until 9 June) So, as I think you suggested, it seems that OOM-killer isn't getting in quickly enough to kill a program and/or not working correctly. Suggestions?
