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What should I do when Ubuntu freezes?

The background

  1. I have ubuntu 12.04 running on a thinkpad with 7.7 GiB RAM and Intel® Core™ i3-2310M CPU @ 2.10GHz × 4 processor
  2. I do a lot of development on my machine. Mostly I use aptana studio and webstorm by jetbrains. I keep a couple of development servers running all the time that are waitress servers running pyramid web servers. Other than this, I keep using ssh, browsers, skype and other normal software that have never given me any problem in ages
  3. Memory of the laptop is 8 GB, The swap size is 2 gb

Here is what is happening, Off late the computer has started going crazy. There has been no change in my usage. I still am the same user I was for a long time. The computer freezes a couple of times a day and nothing works fast enough. Including CTRL+ALT+DELETE, ctrl+alt+f1 etc.

I opened system monitor to see what is causing the problem. All the processes are normal except that the swap is filled to 100% when the problem is happening. The only other problem I can see is that the hard disk light is on all the time. The RAM usage is not even crossing 10% and my cpu is fine. computer is not overheating either. None of the CPU cores have any problem. I am not able to understand what the problem is.

I need help to track down the problem. I have been using ubuntu for 5 years now and I am good enough with linux to do whatever to get it back to working. But I have no idea where to begin.

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Ranjith Ramachandra
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  • Sounds like you have a virus. Check to see which program is using a ton of RAM (Swap is, after all, just virtual RAM.) Did you download the Swap-consuming program from an external source? – JamesTheAwesomeDude Oct 26 '12 at 13:55
  • When I have a problem like this, and I run a little old eeePC-900 netbook at work to support a wiimote whiteboard so I do see it, I run 'top' in a terminal. It shows me what's topping the resouce-use list along with all PIDs. A ctrl-C to stop top followed by 'kill -9 pid' or perhaps 'sudo kill -9 pid' where pid is the process ID of the offending process, and everything is usually fine. Of course, you have to know what you're killing, but it is a way to try and track down the problem. – Marc Jun 05 '13 at 01:18

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