Hi guys! I have a rather beefy machine. AMD Ryzen 7700, 32GB DDR5, GPU 7800XT 16GB, several NVME drives for OS, general data, games. And yet…after a while it becomes completely unresponsive. Mouse freezes, keyboard doesn’t key anything, and the screen gets completely frozen. Meanwhile the disk led gets full activity, almost constantly red. So…While this might be crazy pagination turning the system to a crawl (I have an 8GB swapfile), I want to be able to determine what’s going on. Is there a way I can check any log, or enable any kind of logging that would tell me what happened on the seconds before it became completely unresponsive? Who takes all my memory??

Normal situations where this happens:

Firefox open, multiple windows, lots of tabs. Maybe ~5-8GB of RAM.

Virtmanager running a Windows VM, running a work remote desktop…4GB of RAM

Steam…1GB of RAM

Thunderbird, Deluge, Telegram, Whatsapp…Not much more really.

This shouldn’t even come close to the RAM capacity of this machine. And yet…it really looks like it suffocates without memory. How can I check for issues?

  • folekaule@lemmy.world
    2·
    1 day ago

    It may not be the raw RAM usage.

    My first suspect is the Windows VM especially if it’s running enterprise security software 4GB is probably not enough for modem Windows and it could be trying to use its page file, thrashing your disk in the process.

    Are you able to collect some data from system monitor on paging and disk activity? That could help you narrow it down. You can use btop for a quick terminal option if your gui is non responsive (assuming your could switch to a console). Vmstat is another option that you can run in the background to collect stats over time, but it’s not user friendly.

    • iturnedintoanewt@lemmy.worldOP
      1·
      15 hours ago

      Nothing much enterprise…It’s running “Windows App”, just a glorified RDP with extra authentication settings for SSO etc. Hence why I gave it only 4GB. It’s not just GUI not being responsive, everything is. It’s a full freeze, and I can’t get to the text consoles either. Most I can aspire to, I think, is to gather data from right before the freeze happens…and check it after I reset the computer.

      • folekaule@lemmy.world
        1·
        14 hours ago

        I see. My concern was with security scanning tools often put on computers by enterprise IT departments but it sounds like that’s not the case here.

        In your situation, assuming you’re not finding what you seek with journalctl, I think I would use a tool like vmstat or sar to collect periodic snapshots of CPU, memory, and io. You can tell it to collect data every X seconds and tee that to a file. After you reboot you can see what happened leading up to the crash. You should be able to import the data into a spreadsheet or something for analysis, but it’s not very intuitive and you’ll need to consult man pages for the options and how to interpret them.

        There are a lot of good suggestions in this thread. I would lean towards a hardware or driver issue, maybe bad RAM. Unfortunately these things take a lot of trial and error to figure out.