0

Ubuntu 16.04 with GNOME is my setup

I program in the language R using the R Studio IDE. The rsession program in my system monitor consumes ~200 MB of RAM at any given time. Every 30-60 minutes the rsession consumption exponentially increases until it's consuming ~7 GB in the system monitor. I only have 8 GB of RAM. At this point my entire Ubuntu session basically freezes, and I can only move the mouse around.

Why doesn't Linux catch this type of memory leak before it halts my whole system? The same thing happens when I use this program on Windows, but instead of a system freeze, I get an error, I CTRL+ALT+DEL, kill the program and then I restart the program where I left off and am immediately back in the game.

In Ubuntu everything is totally frozen and I have to hard reset. This kills my workflow for 5-10 minutes. If I continuously CTRL+F1 frantically for several straight minutes I can sometimes get to a terminal console, but that's an exercise in madness. How do I get Ubuntu to put the brakes on rogue processes before they freeze my entire GNOME session? I've filed a bug with R and R Studio but that doesn't help me until this issue is fixed (if ever). I'm fine with the program crashing, I'd simply like to kill, restart, and pickup where I left off.

stackinator
  • 1,941
  • I once had a simliar problem with my 8GB machine (with 8GB swap): firstly the 8GB of RAM went full and then the swap usage increased to 8 GB as well. From the time when swap was used the system went really slow but after the swap was also full (totalling in 16 GB memory consumption) Ubuntu killed the process (it got an out-of-memory) and everything was back to normal. Might this be the same in your case? Ubuntu simply swaps as hell? How much swap do you have? – PerlDuck Mar 11 '18 at 16:35
  • 1
    Have a look here: https://askubuntu.com/q/120765/504066 It explains ulimit – PerlDuck Mar 11 '18 at 16:41
  • I do have a 16 GB swap partition. When my system last froze I tried Alt+SysRq+F but it didn't do anything. I was hitting it frantically but got no response. I then did Alt+SysRq+B and my system rebooted immediately. – stackinator Mar 11 '18 at 23:15

0 Answers0