Xjyuk

I'm using Linux 4.15, and this happens to me many times when I browse Google, Facebook or any other resource-hungry website - The whole OS becomes unresponsive, frozen and useless. The only thing I see it to be working is the disk (main system partition formatted as ext4), which is massively in use (I/O throttling).

I get forced to wait for a minute or more to get rid of the bloat, sometimes it stays unresponsive for twelve minutes, and hence I get frustrated. The fact the OS being not able to well-handle multitasking, tends to reflect an absolutely weird and unacceptable behavior.

Not only this happens with Firefox, but with any javascript-interpreter application including Microsoft VSCode or angular-cli (ng serve command) as well as any other resource-hungry thread of execution - such as the case of plantuml when generating a very large graph from a very complex UML diagram.

Today, the OS becomes totally unmanageable, after launching a data recovery software for an external HDD (over ext4 partition) that got lately unplugged from a bad USB port by little move.

I'm not able to tell the root cause behind such buggy behavior

I have many tabs opened in the browser, and 94% OS-partition usage as per df output:

Filesystem 1K-blocks Used Available Use% Mounted on
udev 3964160 0 3964160 0% /dev
tmpfs 798164 3192 794972 1% /run
/dev/sda5 173466400 153224316 11407424 94% /
tmpfs 3990820 62936 3927884 2% /dev/shm
tmpfs 5120 4 5116 1% /run/lock
tmpfs 3990820 0 3990820 0% /sys/fs/cgroup
/dev/loop5 128 128 0 100% /snap/anbox-installer/24
/dev/loop2 128 128 0 100% /snap/anbox-installer/17
/dev/loop4 223616 223616 0 100% /snap/kde-frameworks-5/26
/dev/loop3 90624 90624 0 100% /snap/core/7169
/dev/loop7 223616 223616 0 100% /snap/kde-frameworks-5/25
/dev/loop8 90624 90624 0 100% /snap/core/7270
/dev/loop0 87552 87552 0 100% /snap/qownnotes/2160
/dev/loop1 241664 241664 0 100% /snap/kde-frameworks-5/27
tmpfs 798164 0 798164 0% /run/user/0
tmpfs 798164 32 798132 1% /run/user/1000
/dev/loop9 87552 87552 0 100% /snap/qownnotes/2176
/dev/sda3 188669948 187132488 1537460 100% /media/kais/DATA
/dev/sdb1 15142960 2091904 13051056 14% /media/kais/STORE N GO

As hardware, I'm using:

1. 
   

   Intel Core i3 v2348M as per lscpu:

   
   
   

   Architecture: x86_64
   CPU op-mode(s): 32-bit, 64-bit
   Byte Order: Little Endian
   Address sizes: 36 bits physical, 48 bits virtual
   CPU(s): 4
   On-line CPU(s) list: 0-3
   Thread(s) per core: 2
   Core(s) per socket: 2
   Socket(s): 1
   NUMA node(s): 1
   Vendor ID: GenuineIntel
   CPU family: 6
   Model: 42
   Model name: Intel(R) Core(TM) i3-2348M CPU @ 2.30GHz
   Stepping: 7
   CPU MHz: 905.312
   CPU max MHz: 2300.0000
   CPU min MHz: 800.0000
   BogoMIPS: 4589.49
   Virtualization: VT-x
   L1d cache: 32K
   L1i cache: 32K
   L2 cache: 256K
   L3 cache: 3072K
   NUMA node0 CPU(s): 0-3
   Flags: fpu vme de pse tsc msr pae mce cx8 apic sep mtrr pge mca cmov pat pse36 clflush dts acpi mmx fxsr sse sse2 ss ht tm pbe syscall nx rdtscp lm constant_tsc arch_perfmon pebs bts rep_good nopl xtopology nonstop_tsc cpuid aperfmperf pni pclmulqdq dtes64 monitor ds_cpl vmx est tm2 ssse3 cx16 xtpr pdcm pcid sse4_1 sse4_2 x2apic popcnt tsc_deadline_timer xsave avx lahf_lm epb pti tpr_shadow vnmi flexpriority ept vpid xsaveopt dtherm arat pln pts
   

   
   


2. 
   

   8 GB of RAM, as per dmidecode -t memory:

   
   
   

   
   

   Getting SMBIOS data from sysfs.
   SMBIOS 2.7 present.

   
   
   

   Handle 0x0005, DMI type 5, 24 bytes
   Memory Controller Information Error Detecting Method: None Error Correcting Capabilities: None Supported Interleave: One-way
   Interleave Current Interleave: One-way Interleave Maximum Memory
   Module Size: 8192 MB Maximum Total Memory Size: 32768 MB Supported
   Speeds: Other Supported Memory Types: Other Memory Module
   Voltage: Unknown Associated Memory Slots: 4 0x0006 0x0007
   0x0008 0x0009 Enabled Error Correcting Capabilities: None

   
   
   

   Handle 0x0006, DMI type 6, 12 bytes
   Memory Module Information Socket Designation: DIMM0 Bank Connections: None Current Speed: Unknown Type: DIMM Installed
   Size: 4096 MB (Single-bank Connection) Enabled Size: 4096 MB
   (Single-bank Connection) Error Status: OK

   
   
   

   Handle 0x0007, DMI type 6, 12 bytes
   Memory Module Information Socket Designation: DIMM1 Bank Connections: None Current Speed: Unknown Type: DIMM Installed
   Size: Not Installed Enabled Size: Not Installed Error Status: OK

   
   
   

   Handle 0x0008, DMI type 6, 12 bytes
   Memory Module Information Socket Designation: DIMM1 Bank Connections: None Current Speed: Unknown Type: DIMM Installed
   Size: 4096 MB (Single-bank Connection) Enabled Size: 4096 MB
   (Single-bank Connection) Error Status: OK

   
   
   

   Handle 0x0009, DMI type 6, 12 bytes
   Memory Module Information Socket Designation: DIMM3 Bank Connections: None Current Speed: Unknown Type: DIMM Installed
   Size: Not Installed Enabled Size: Not Installed Error Status: OK

   
   
   

   Handle 0x001A, DMI type 16, 23 bytes
   Physical Memory Array Location: System Board Or Motherboard Use: System Memory Error Correction Type: None Maximum Capacity: 32 GB
   Error Information Handle: Not Provided Number Of Devices: 4

   
   
   

   Handle 0x001B, DMI type 17, 34 bytes
   Memory Device Array Handle: 0x001A Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 64 bits Data Width: 64 bits Size: 4096 MB
   Form Factor: SODIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM0 Bank Locator: BANK
   0 Type: DDR3 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 1333 MT/s
   Manufacturer: Nanya Technology Serial Number: C866315B Asset Tag:
   Unknown Part Number: NT4GC64B8HG0NS-CG Rank: 2 Configured Memory
   Speed: 1333 MT/s

   
   
   

   Handle 0x001C, DMI type 17, 34 bytes
   Memory Device Array Handle: 0x001A Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: Unknown Data Width: Unknown Size: No Module
   Installed Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM1 Bank
   Locator: BANK 1 Type: Unknown Type Detail: Unknown Speed: Unknown
   Manufacturer: Empty Serial Number: Empty Asset Tag: Unknown Part
   Number: Empty Rank: Unknown Configured Memory Speed: Unknown

   
   
   

   Handle 0x001D, DMI type 17, 34 bytes
   Memory Device Array Handle: 0x001A Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: 64 bits Data Width: 64 bits Size: 4096 MB
   Form Factor: SODIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM1 Bank Locator: BANK
   2 Type: DDR3 Type Detail: Synchronous Speed: 1333 MT/s
   Manufacturer: Samsung Serial Number: 928839F8 Asset Tag: Unknown
   Part Number: M471B5273CH0-CH9 Rank: 2 Configured Memory Speed:
   1333 MT/s

   
   
   

   Handle 0x001E, DMI type 17, 34 bytes
   Memory Device Array Handle: 0x001A Error Information Handle: Not Provided Total Width: Unknown Data Width: Unknown Size: No Module
   Installed Form Factor: DIMM Set: None Locator: DIMM3 Bank
   Locator: BANK 3 Type: Unknown Type Detail: Unknown Speed: Unknown
   Manufacturer: Empty Serial Number: Empty Asset Tag: Unknown Part
   Number: Empty Rank: Unknown Configured Memory Speed: Unknown

   
   

   
   


3. 99.83 MHz of mainboard bus speed


4. 
   

   500 GB internal HDD - This is the S.M.A.R.T. report from the
   operating system:

   
   
   

   smartctl 6.6 2017-11-05 r4594 [x86_64-linux-4.15.0-33-generic] (local build)
   Copyright (C) 2002-17, Bruce Allen, Christian Franke, www.smartmontools.org
   
   === START OF INFORMATION SECTION ===
   Model Family: Western Digital Blue Mobile
   Device Model: WDC WD5000LPVX-22V0TT0
   Serial Number: WD-WXE1E13AAMR4
   LU WWN Device Id: 5 0014ee 25db04ba7
   Firmware Version: 01.01A01
   User Capacity: 500,107,862,016 bytes [500 GB]
   Sector Sizes: 512 bytes logical, 4096 bytes physical
   Rotation Rate: 5400 rpm
   Device is: In smartctl database [for details use: -P show]
   ATA Version is: ACS-2 (minor revision not indicated)
   SATA Version is: SATA 3.0, 6.0 Gb/s (current: 6.0 Gb/s)
   Local Time is: Wed Aug 7 15:52:05 2019 CET
   SMART support is: Available - device has SMART capability.
   SMART support is: Enabled
   
   === START OF READ SMART DATA SECTION ===
   SMART overall-health self-assessment test result: PASSED
   
   General SMART Values:
   Offline data collection status: (0x00) Offline data collection activity
    was never started.
    Auto Offline Data Collection: Disabled.
   Self-test execution status: ( 0) The previous self-test routine completed
    without error or no self-test has ever 
    been run.
   Total time to complete Offline 
   data collection: ( 8040) seconds.
   Offline data collection
   capabilities: (0x7b) SMART execute Offline immediate.
    Auto Offline data collection on/off support.
    Suspend Offline collection upon new
    command.
    Offline surface scan supported.
    Self-test supported.
    Conveyance Self-test supported.
    Selective Self-test supported.
   SMART capabilities: (0x0003) Saves SMART data before entering
    power-saving mode.
    Supports SMART auto save timer.
   Error logging capability: (0x01) Error logging supported.
    General Purpose Logging supported.
   Short self-test routine 
   recommended polling time: ( 2) minutes.
   Extended self-test routine
   recommended polling time: ( 93) minutes.
   Conveyance self-test routine
   recommended polling time: ( 5) minutes.
   SCT capabilities: (0x7035) SCT Status supported.
    SCT Feature Control supported.
    SCT Data Table supported.
   
   SMART Attributes Data Structure revision number: 16
   Vendor Specific SMART Attributes with Thresholds:
   ID# ATTRIBUTE_NAME FLAG VALUE WORST THRESH TYPE UPDATED WHEN_FAILED RAW_VALUE
    1 Raw_Read_Error_Rate 0x002f 200 200 051 Pre-fail Always - 1
    3 Spin_Up_Time 0x0027 149 143 021 Pre-fail Always - 1541
    4 Start_Stop_Count 0x0032 057 057 000 Old_age Always - 43173
    5 Reallocated_Sector_Ct 0x0033 200 200 140 Pre-fail Always - 0
    7 Seek_Error_Rate 0x002e 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
    9 Power_On_Hours 0x0032 083 083 000 Old_age Always - 12797
    10 Spin_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
    11 Calibration_Retry_Count 0x0032 100 100 000 Old_age Always - 0
    12 Power_Cycle_Count 0x0032 091 091 000 Old_age Always - 9496
   191 G-Sense_Error_Rate 0x0032 001 001 000 Old_age Always - 250
   192 Power-Off_Retract_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 399
   193 Load_Cycle_Count 0x0032 147 147 000 Old_age Always - 160989
   194 Temperature_Celsius 0x0022 101 092 000 Old_age Always - 42
   196 Reallocated_Event_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
   197 Current_Pending_Sector 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
   198 Offline_Uncorrectable 0x0030 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
   199 UDMA_CRC_Error_Count 0x0032 200 200 000 Old_age Always - 0
   200 Multi_Zone_Error_Rate 0x0008 100 253 000 Old_age Offline - 0
   
   SMART Error Log Version: 1
   No Errors Logged
   
   SMART Self-test log structure revision number 1
   No self-tests have been logged. [To run self-tests, use: smartctl -t]
   
   SMART Selective self-test log data structure revision number 1
    SPAN MIN_LBA MAX_LBA CURRENT_TEST_STATUS
    1 0 0 Not_testing
    2 0 0 Not_testing
    3 0 0 Not_testing
    4 0 0 Not_testing
    5 0 0 Not_testing
   Selective self-test flags (0x0):
    After scanning selected spans, do NOT read-scan remainder of disk.
   If Selective self-test is pending on power-up, resume after 0 minute delay.
   

   
   

These are the results of resource usage per htop:

 1 [||||| 14.1%] Tasks: 286, 1497 thr; 2 running
 2 [||||| 13.2%] Load average: 3.00 4.97 6.09 
 3 [||||| 12.5%] Uptime: 3 days, 16:12:35
 4 [||| 9.3%]
 Mem[|||||||||||||||||||5.09G/7.61G]
 Swp[|||||||||||||||||||3.68G/4.65G]

 PID USER PRI NI VIRT RES SHR S CPU% MEM% TIME+ Command
 7006 jvb 20 0 6640M 102M 6780 S 5.3 1.3 18:53.18 java -Xmx3072m -X
 8224 kais 20 0 4537M 771M 200M S 6.6 9.9 2h31:23 /usr/lib/firefox/
 2299 kais 20 0 2958M 184M 42912 S 5.3 2.4 13:54.41 /usr/lib/firefox/
 1216 root 20 0 519M 120M 94640 S 5.3 1.5 1h52:50 /usr/lib/xorg/Xor
28401 kais 20 0 3354M 584M 107M S 7.9 7.5 34:44.51 /usr/lib/firefox/
 8439 kais 20 0 4537M 771M 200M S 4.6 9.9 37:06.21 /usr/lib/firefox/
 8831 kais 20 0 3222M 351M 64828 R 4.0 4.5 11:19.87 /usr/lib/firefox/
 7025 jvb 20 0 6640M 102M 6780 S 0.0 1.3 0:18.34 java -Xmx3072m -X
 7027 jvb 20 0 6640M 102M 6780 S 0.0 1.3 0:18.05 java -Xmx3072m -X
 5901 kais 20 0 7492 5612 2904 R 4.0 0.1 0:00.66 htop
 5329 kais 20 0 547M 47456 38388 S 1.3 0.6 0:01.29 /usr/lib/gnome-te
13540 kais 20 0 2958M 184M 42912 S 2.0 2.4 0:06.25 /usr/lib/firefox/
16897 kais 20 0 904M 28292 18076 S 2.0 0.4 50:08.37 pavucontrol
17999 kais 20 0 2424M 29460 25380 S 1.3 0.4 52:41.73 /usr/bin/pulseaud
F1 Help F2 Setup F3 Search F4 Filter F5 Tree F6 SortBy F7 Nice - F8 Nice + F9 Kill F10 Quit

AFAIK, bloatware shouldn't make the OS unresponsive, so I wouldn't consider or even accept that the bloatware is the root cause of the problem - since the OS job is isolating processes and ensuring multitasking.

I don't know whether this issue is OS-specific, hardware-specific, or configuration-specific.

Any ideas?

What can make Linux so unresponsive?

Overcommitting available RAM, which causes a large amount of swapping, can definitely do this. Remember that random access I/O on your mechanical HDD requires moving a read/write head, which can only do around 100 seeks per second.

It's usual for Linux to go totally out to lunch, if you overcommit RAM "too much". I also have a spinny disk and 8GB RAM. I have had problems with a couple of pieces of software with memory leaks. I.e. their memory usage keeps growing over time and never shrinks, so the only way to control it would have been to stop the software and then restart it. Based on the experiences I had during this, I am not very surprised to hear delays over ten minutes, if you are generating 3GB+ of swap.

You won't necessarily see this in all cases where you have more than 3GB of swap. Theory says the key concept is thrashing. On the other hand, if you are trying to switch between two different working sets, and it requires swapping 3GB in and out, at 100MB/s it will take at least 60 seconds even if the I/O pattern can be perfectly optimized. In practice, the I/O pattern will be far from optimal.

After the difficulty I had with this, I reformatted my swap space to 2GB (several times smaller than before), so the system would not be able to swap as deeply. You can do this even without messing around resizing the partition, because mkswap takes an optional size parameter.

The rough balance is between running out of memory and having processes get killed, and having the system hang for so long that you give up and reboot anyway. I don't know if a 4GB swap partition is too large; it might depend what you're doing. The important thing is to watch out for when the disk starts churning, check your memory usage, and respond accordingly.

Checking memory usage of multi-process applications is difficult. To see memory usage per-process without double-counting shared memory, you can use sudo atop -R, press M and m, and look in the PSIZE column. You can also use smem. smem -t -P firefox will show PSS of all your firefox processes, followed by a line with total PSS. This is the correct approach to measure total memory usage of Firefox or Chrome based browsers. (Though there are also browser-specific features for showing memory usage, which will show individual tabs).

What's the output of free -m? The amount of RAM you have is pointless if we don't know how much you're using. That and I'm interested to know how much swap space is being used.

I do think you've answered your own question, though. Having open "many tabs" open in your browser can definitely slow down your system if you're never closing them, as they'll continue to consume memory regardless; when your system freezes, how many do you have open at a time?

It also makes sense if your system is freezing up from other memory-intensive tasks such as "generating a very large graph from a very complex UML diagram". That will absolutely slow down your system as it generates the graph, so that's hardly a surprise.

It really sounds like this is the way your system is supposed to behave. Either that or I'm missing something here.

By the way, HDD stats don't matter when it comes to your system becoming unresponsive since a lack of memory is almost always the culprit.

AFAIK, bloatware shouldn't make the OS unresponsive, so I wouldn't consider or even accept that the bloatware is the root cause of the problem

You're not going to like this, but I think bloatware is your problem (although I'm not sure if it's memory or disk which is the problem). Unfortunately, the Linux kernel is awful at handling high memory pressure situations, and is known to basically require a reboot once memory is exhausted. There are three things which lead me to believe your issue is resource exhaustion:

1. Your disk space on root (/) and DATA is almost full. I'm not sure what you use DATA for, but I've ran into issues before with resizing my root partition too small and my system becoming inoperable.


2. You have high-memory pressure, meaning that your RAM is almost full. When RAM starts to get full you will start to get page faults. Page faults happen when the kernel is unable to allocate enough memory for a process and must instead use some of the systems much slower swap space. This leads us to our last observation:


3. Your swap space is almost full. There's clearly some high memory pressure on your system since both RAM and swap are almost full.

Basically, put these three together and your system doesn't have enough resources available to do much of anything. As for it's unfortunate how poorly Linux handles low-memory situations (compared to, say, the NT kernel in Windows) but that seems to be how it is. You can find more discussion in this Reddit thread and its linked mailing list.

As for how to fix your situation, I would say increasing your swap size is a good idea, but since you're low on disk space that will be a problem. Unless your Minecraft server has a ton of people, I think it would be safe to reduce its memory to something around 1024m (I personally use 1024m with about 10 people and it works fine). I would also use spigot or paper for your Minecraft server since they tend to be more performant.

Good luck!