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I run Ubuntu 18.04 on a Lenovo ThinkPad. Lately I've started using VoiP capable apps like Zoom and Microsoft Teams.

They sometimes (more than 50% of the incidents) cause my GUI to freeze up. I still hear, and can still talk, and when the service includes video people still see me just fine, but my computer completely seizes up.

I can't move to a new gui with CTRL + ALT + F1 etc, but SysRq does work.

According to lshw My RAM is 16GiB SODIMM DDR4 Synchronous 2133 MHz.

When I run free -h I get:

total used free shared buff/cache available Mem: 15G 4.7G 7.1G 364M 3.6G 10G Swap: 2.0G 0B 2.0G

But I am not seeing my swap partition when I run lsblk | grep -v "snap" I get:

NAME MAJ:MIN RM SIZE RO TYPE MOUNTPOINT nvme0n1 259:0 0 477G 0 disk ├─nvme0n1p1 259:1 0 512M 0 part /boot/efi └─nvme0n1p2 259:2 0 476.4G 0 part /

UPDATE:

So I read https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq And increased the swap file to 8 GB like so: sudo swapoff /swapfile sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=6144 oflag=append conv=notrunc sudo mkswap /swapfile sudo swapon /swapfile

BTW I used dd instead of fallocate because of fallocate vs dd for swapfile?

And if anything my computer is now less stable. Is the next step increasing it to 16GB or trying something else?

Uberhumus
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    What are your RAM specs? How much swap space do you have on your machine? I ran into a similar freezing issue and it turned out my swap space was 2 mbs. – Robby1212 Mar 24 '20 at 22:01
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    @Robby1212, I updated the question according to your comment.. – Uberhumus Mar 24 '20 at 22:27

1 Answers1

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You may not have a swap partition; swap files are now the default for Ubuntu installs and have been since version 17.10.

https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SwapFaq provides good explanations of the basic concepts. If you only have a 2GB swap file, expanding it to at least 4GB if not more (some apps need more, and Hibernation always needs at least as much swap space as you have in hardware memory modules) may be very helpful.

That's not guaranteed, mind you, but it's easy to do, far easier than expanding a swap partition.

K7AAY
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