This has been bothering me for a long time on Ubuntu 14.04. I installed with encrypted home and swap, but after numerous freezes tried unencrypted swap and now just run with disabled swap however it still seems to kick in automatically and start freezing when I run out of RAM. Most of the time when it starts to freeze up I notice and quickly hit Ctrl-W or Alt-F4 to save the system, free up some memory and keep using it.
-- 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: Incomplete 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