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I've recently upgraded to Ubuntu Gnome 17.04 without any issues for more than a week. Due to a subsequent update most probably, running memory-intensive tasks causes the system to hang completely (image freezes, no response to mouse and keyboard input including Ctrl+Alt+F*, SSH server stops responding). I've only waited a few minutes at a time once this happened before powering off.

Tried switching to a previous kernel version (4.10.19 instead of 4.10.21), but the issue still occurred.

My SSD seems fine (SMART tests, fsck, and badblocks report no problems on all partitions). Windows boots normally and swaps OK. Couldn't find anything in syslog (I don't think logging still works when this happens).

My only solution right now is to stop swapping and start losing processes when my memory usage hits maximum.

What are my options here? Is there a way to identify which update is causing this issue? If I wait long enough will (and if so how long?) would the system become responsive again?

I do not remember installing any packages before this started to happen, which is why I'm thinking this was caused by an update.

Update:

As I was using my computer without swap to avoid it hanging I've noticed the following:

I reactivated swap and set swappiness to 80% and then to 100%, and even though my RAM usage was above 60%, not swapping happened in either case.

This means that swap is not working. I've also tried to use a different swap area which didn't help.

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Anthony
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  • Try reducing your swappiness. –  Jun 01 '17 at 12:09
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    Thanks @MarkYisri. I've actually noticed that the system was using about 190Mb of swap the last time it froze, and the RAM was increasing steadily until it hit the maximum and the system stopped responding. This is why I think the problem is with aggressive swapping as the main memory saturates. My instinct is to increase the swappiness so that the system would not have to wait until RAM is full and be forced to shove a whole lot of data in the swap partition because there's nowhere else to put it. I'll experiment with both I guess and I'll let you know what I find. – Anthony Jun 01 '17 at 13:27
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    Don't run badblocks on a SSD! From the terminal show me the output of free -h and swapon and sudo blkid and cat /etc/fstab. Set your vm.swappiness back to 60. Edit/paste that output into your question, not the comments, please. Start comments directed to me with @heynnema or I may miss them. – heynnema Jun 01 '17 at 18:34
  • @Anthony how much RAM do you have? –  Jun 01 '17 at 22:26
  • Same problem here, except I use 16.04 LTS. The issue gets worse when I use kernel 4.11, but it also occurs (freezes, but sometimes unfreezes) on 4.4. Played with swapiness and other parameters, but nothing helps. I think the problem is in the custom Ubuntu kernel. – Konrad Gajewski Nov 12 '17 at 01:40

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