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Edit 2: Problem solved by disabling OOM killer and overcommit.

G'day,

I'm running 4x8GB sticks of corsair vengeance LPX RAM, a 5700xt and an r5 3600x.

I just installed ubuntu 20.04 a week ago to dual-boot with windows and I've been having RAM-related problems. Google chrome pages have been crashing with the aw, snap error: SIGSEGV. Chrome will also completely crash if I have too many tabs open. I ran memtest86 from the ubuntu boot menu and it freezes at 16% on the first pass when I have all my ram in and 35% when only 2 sticks are in (doesn't seem to matter which two sticks or which DIMM slots, either). I've yet to be able to get past 2 seconds into a memtest86 test.

I don't have these issues when I run windows as the OS and the Windows Memory Diagnostic didn't return any errors. It seems like the issues come when I try to access more than a certain amount of RAM in Ubuntu but I'm not sure.

The command free -m shows the amount of memory i'd expect.

Does anyone have any thoughts? I've tried installing PPA drivers for my GPU and had a look at the latency timings for my RAM in the UEFI but no luck.

Cheers.

Edit: Memtest86 freezes 2 seconds into the first pass in Ubuntu but runs for hours with no errors when booted from USB. Both chrome and firefox frequently crash on Ubuntu but run perfectly under much more stress in Windows 10.

RuddyDev
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    If memtest86 shows problems with the RAM, then it's probably faulty. The fact that you encounter problems in Ubuntu and not on Windows might only mean that Ubuntu accesses other areas of the RAM than Windows does, or is less tolerant when it comes to faults. Did you try all possible combinations of RAM sticks to rule out a possible faulty one? Remember it is also possible that two of the sticks are faulty. – Sebastian May 29 '20 at 07:42
  • Well memtest86 doesn't actually run long enough to find an error, it just freezes at the same. I tried a bunch of ram combinations and thought I covered most of them. Will do another test because I couldn't get it to post with a single stick but I only tried it for two of them. Just seems weird that I only have the problem while running Ubuntu and my ram seems fine on windows while doing more RAM-intensive tasks. – RuddyDev May 29 '20 at 08:47
  • memtest86 is OS-independent, that's why I think it's rather not the fault of the OS. And yes, usually you have to use the RAM slots in pairs, so you will have to switch around until you find the one(s) that give problems. Be aware that some memtest86 checks run quite a long time though. But it should definitely run longer than 2 seconds. – Sebastian May 29 '20 at 09:24
  • @Sebastian I did a bunch more tests running memtest through the ubuntu boot menu and had the same issue (ubuntu freezing) with each possible 2-stick combination of ram. I downloaded memtest onto a USB and ran it that way for a couple hours (with all my RAM sticks in) and it found zero errors and had no problems running. Memtest still freezes after 2 seconds when I run it through ubuntu. Again, I have zero memory-related issues running windows 10 but am still having chrome and firefox tabs either crash with errors or just have the whole application quit when running Ubuntu. Any suggestions? – RuddyDev May 31 '20 at 09:37
  • Then I don't know what could be the problem. Is it only web browsers that crash, or other applications too? Seems weird that only Chrome and Firefox would have problems. – Sebastian May 31 '20 at 10:06
  • I've basically only used those two browsers and a text editor and terminal on Ubuntu. I imagine I'd probably have issues with any RAM-intensive programs, it's just that I haven't used any others on Ubuntu. I might try reinstalling or something if I can figure out how to keep my files. – RuddyDev May 31 '20 at 23:44
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    I would poke around a little more before reinstalling the whole system. Firefox usually isn't that memory-intensive, Chrome maybe more so, but it still seems weird that they consistently crash while using maybe 5% of your RAM. Try using some other programs that use a lot of RAM. Also, have journalctl --follow run in a terminal and see if it says something when there is a crash. And if you're using snap packages, try using an apt package or a manual installation instead - snaps are often not very stable. – Sebastian Jun 01 '20 at 08:26
  • @Sebastian ended up disabling OOM killer and overcommit and the problem seems to be gone. – RuddyDev Jun 03 '20 at 01:37
  • I've been using OOM killer for years without any problems. I tested it last year and it seems to work just fine: How to test oom-killer from command line – WinEunuuchs2Unix Jun 03 '20 at 02:38
  • @WinEunuuchs2Unix can't say if it was OOM killer or overcommit that was causing my problem but it seems it was one of them, although I think there may have been an underlying issue contributing as well. I'm not making any value judgements about OOM killer, just that it caused issues for me. I suspect it was OOM killer rather than overcommit as my problem was with processes being killed and that appears to be OOM killer's primary action. – RuddyDev Jun 03 '20 at 03:14
  • @RuddyDev I can't say I understand your problem. When you run memory test from grub Ubuntu isn't even loaded. OOM Killer doesn't use any RAM, it frees up RAM when you run out of RAM. I have no idea what overcommit does so cannot help in that department. – WinEunuuchs2Unix Jun 03 '20 at 04:18
  • I have no idea either and I haven't tried running memtest through ubuntu since I fixed the problem (or at least the symptoms that were affecting me). Either way, I'm not having the issues anymore and I don't really care to understand why, at least for now. – RuddyDev Jun 03 '20 at 04:54

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