My spouse is running Ubuntu 18.04 on a Thinkpad X1 that has been crashing a lot. Usually he's got a bunch of tabs open but nothing that should crash a relatively powerful laptop.
The machine freezes and the only solution is a power cycle because it is otherwise unresponsive.
I am used to being able to get to another TTY to troubleshoot with ctrl-alt-F3 but that doesn't seem to work on his machine.
One oddity, when I run top
it reports zero swap:
KiB Swap: 0 total, 0 free, 0 used
That can't be right, but free
confirms it:
amanda@Flatbush:~$ sudo free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7.7G 5.4G 164M 1.5G 2.1G 516M
Swap: 0B 0B 0B
By contrast, my machine is a few years older than his and works fine. There, free
shows:
amanda@mona:~$ sudo free -h
total used free shared buff/cache available
Mem: 7.7G 1.2G 5.1G 237M 1.3G 5.9G
Swap: 7.8G 0B 7.8G
The good machine has way more memory and way more available swap (though to be fair I just fired it up to compare and don't have anything running on it).
I suspect that the issue is connected to the differences in memory but I don't know how to go about fixing it. s
Best Answer
The description and the
free
output suggest that the system may be crashing when it runs out of RAM, and swap is not enabled. (Browser tabs can sometimes consume a staggering amount of resources)One easy solution:
swapon