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I know the title is a bit ambiguous but that is what I have experienced few times this week.

These are the symptoms I have spotted:

  • mouse movements start to get choppy
  • music (YouTube in Firefox) stars to cut out (every second or so)
  • sometimes, after couple of minutes of the struggle, mouse stops completely, so does the sound
  • I cannot invoke Alt + F2, system is complely irresponsive

Now, I reviewed journal in search for a clue, but I have not enough knowledge to understand what could have got wrong.

Here is the snippet of a journal (around the time the total freeze occured):

https://paste.ubuntu.com/p/bJydGVGcKb/

The only things that stood up from the logs were gnome-shell and pulse-audio, but I cannot say whether those two causes it. I know from prior experience that gnome-shell sometimes outputs hundreds of JS error messages (per second).

The freeze started around 17:55 and the system recovered after 4-5 minutes.

UPDATE:

Output of free -h:

jovan@jovan-Z68X-UD5-B3:~$ free -h
              total        used        free      shared  buff/cache   available
Mem:           15Gi       5,2Gi       5,5Gi       174Mi       4,9Gi         9Gi
Swap:         2,0Gi       220Mi       1,8Gi

Output of lshw:

https://pastebin.ubuntu.com/p/ZKJbhjvgtZ/

Swappiness:

jovan@jovan-Z68X-UD5-B3:~$ sysctl vm.swappiness
vm.swappiness = 60

GNOME extensions (nothing in ~/.local, only in /usr):

jovan@jovan-Z68X-UD5-B3:~$ ls -al /usr/share/gnome-shell/extensions
total 20
drwxr-xr-x 5 root root 4096 апр 23 09:35 .
drwxr-xr-x 7 root root 4096 авг 19 06:54 ..
drwxr-xr-x 2 root root 4096 авг 14 20:13 desktop-icons@csoriano
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 апр 23 09:35 ubuntu-appindicators@ubuntu.com
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 јун 22 10:16 ubuntu-dock@ubuntu.com

SSD Disk SMART data:

enter image description here

Jovan Perovic
  • 133

2 Answers2

2

This are typical symptoms of:

  1. Bad spinning drive, bad sectors Or
  2. Using swap memory, so all the system slows down. Maybe you're using way more memory than you physically have and the system is using swap.

You can open a terminal and monitor the memory consumption with:

htop

Or

top

Or

free -h

Also check the swappiness. The default value of 60 is not appropriate in my opinion and you can change it to 10 probably:

sysctl vm.swappiness

Check the logs with grep -i "kill" I guess you'll see your system killing processes when it exhausts the RAM and swap.

Carles Mateo
  • 1,647
  • 7
  • 12
1

BIOS

Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD5-B3

You have BIOS version F6, from 5/10/2011.

There's a newer BIOS available, version F10, from 2/20/2012, and can be downloaded here.

Note: Confirm that I have the correct web page for your motherboard.

Note: Have good backups before updating the BIOS.

Swap

Your swap is kind of smallish. Let's increase it to 4G.

Note: Incorrect use of the dd command can cause data loss. Suggest copy/paste.

sudo swapoff -a           # turn off swap
sudo rm -i /swapfile      # remove old /swapfile

sudo dd if=/dev/zero of=/swapfile bs=1M count=4096


sudo chmod 600 /swapfile  # set proper file protections
sudo mkswap /swapfile     # init /swapfile
sudo swapon /swapfile     # turn on swap
free -h                   # confirm 16G RAM and 4G swap

Confirm this line in /etc/fstab... and confirm no other “swap” lines...

/swapfile    none    swap    sw      0   0

reboot                    # reboot and verify operation
heynnema
  • 73,649