I’m using an XPS 13 9350 with 16GB of RAM and the Intel Graphics 540. I am using Fedora KDE spin. When I am using computer, either randomly or when I start a program, my computer will slow down and quickly fully freeze. In this state, the only thing I can do is shut it down. Is there any way to make it so that a program is killed, or something else that doesn’t fully stop my system?

  • taiidan@slrpnk.net
    30·
    1 month ago

    • Ctrl + Alt + F[1-0] to access other TTYs which might still be responsive even if your desktop environment is unresponsive. Pull up top/htop and ID the problematic process to kill.

    • Agree with using an oom killer.

    • Do you need more swap? Can use swap file if expanding swap partition is problematic.

  • MonkderVierte@lemmy.ml
    16·
    1 month ago

    Getting sluggish and then freezing sounds like RAM full. Earlyoom might help, it kills the abuser quicker than the in-kernel but notoriously slow-triggering solution.

    And prelockd might help too; it reserves place for some libraries in memory, so they don’t get involved in the freeze haze.

    • tmpod@lemmy.pt
      41·
      1 month ago

      Never knew about prelockd, seems like a pretty neat and useful idea, thanks!

  • Romkslrqusz@lemm.ee
    14·
    1 month ago

    If this is a hard / full system freeze, there will be nothing you can do because the system has fully locked up. Test whether or not this is the case by pressing CapsLock and seeing if the status indicator light changes states.

    Freezing like you describe is often a hardware issue, I recommend that you start by testing your RAM with Memtest86

  • absGeekNZ@lemmy.nzEnglish
    12·
    1 month ago

    I had a similar issue, running Mint.

    It took me a while, but I tracked it to a buggy firmware on the nvme SSD (WD black 4000). Once I updated the firmware, all the stability issues disappeared.

    If your system in under heavy disk load when the issue appears, take a look at your SSD firmware.

  • fmstrat@lemmy.nowsci.comEnglish
    71·
    1 month ago

    Personally, I wouldn’t accept this as a normal thing to work around.

    You likely have a hardware issue, or a hardware incompatibility. Everyone talking about low RAM is forgetting that the kernel is going to kill a non-required process if it eats up memory and is causing a panic. Most of the time you’ll get crashes, not freezes.

    Does it always freeze when beginning work? Run software to do full checks on RAM (memtester) and disk (smartctl long test), as those are the most likely culprits.

    If that doesn’t work, and you don’t have spares to try, maybe dual-boot or USB boot Debian to try a different OS with a different build structure to rule out incompatibility.

  • not_amm@lemmy.ml
    4·
    1 month ago

    That used to happen to me A LOT. Right now it only happens because I have a faulty RAM that I’m planning to replace very soon, but before that, I think the CPU was overheated and it forcefully rebooted my laptop, at least that was my impression by the logs at boot.

    After a long time of debugging, I decided to, first, disable hibernation to see if that was a problem, then I disabled CPU boost and I think that was the cause of overheating, since, for some reason, my distro decided that it was a good idea to use CPU boost for any common task and it caused overheating.

    I haven’t had any problems not related to faulty RAM since then lol

  • gnuhaut@lemmy.ml
    2·
    1 month ago

    The “slow down and then quickly fully freeze”, while it could be other things, might be a low RAM situation. Could be some buggy program that is leaking memory. Try running EarlyOOM or systemd-oomd.

  • tisktisk@piefed.socialEnglish
    2·
    1 month ago

    How long have you been using fedora on this laptop? I had a similar issue with my xps 13 where this would happen everytime I tried to update it. I posted several help threads and lots of experienced people tried to help, but no solution was ever found.

    Hope you have better luck than me, but I gave up after weeks of effort and just installed gentoo. I now use nothing but gentoo because of this incredibly painful experience.