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It's been the last two days that out of nowhere - my chromium/chrome browser is constantly crashing with the aw snap error / where firefox works without issue. I thought this might be related to an issue I was having with my last pass extension(as I was experiencing a known bug with their extension at this time). Since then I rebooted/disabled all my extensions and tested again - still the same issue happening constantly! Checked forums, confirmed in dmesg that I was running out of memory (I'm on a 16gb Dell XPS 13 with hardly any tabs open):

[20968.163307] Out of memory: Kill process 11700 (chromium-browse) score 304 or sacrifice child [20968.163312] Killed process 11700 (chromium-browse) total-vm:2017292kB, anon-rss:123152kB, file-rss:84092kB

Adding apt-cache policy:

chromium-browser:  
  Installed: 55.0.2883.87-0ubuntu0.16.04.1263  
  Candidate: 55.0.2883.87-0ubuntu0.16.04.1263  
  Version table:  
 *** 55.0.2883.87-0ubuntu0.16.04.1263 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-updates/universe amd64 Packages
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial-security/universe amd64 Packages
        100 /var/lib/dpkg/status
     49.0.2623.108-0ubuntu1.1233 500
        500 http://archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu xenial/universe amd64 Packages

I then amended my swappiness from 60 to 10 following these instructions: How do I configure swappiness? Still had the same issue... Read another link about extending my minvmfreekbytes - where I increased it to 160mb : https://blog.kylemanna.com/linux/google-chrome-aw-snap/ ..still the same issue.. Can someone please help? It seemed to work fine for the last month and I have all my extensions set up so I want to avoid changing browser. Thanks

tokera
  • 101

1 Answers1

8

This appears to be a kernel issue, discussion here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/1655842

It is claimed that this will be fixed by the next kernel update.

A quick and dirty fix that appears to work is this:

sudo su
echo 3 > /proc/sys/vm/drop_caches

edit: Seems like the "fix" needs to be applied every ~12 hours. A more permanent solution is to downgrade the kernel to 4.4.0-57.