Let me first give my laptop's description, it is: Processor : Dual-Core Intel® Core™2 Duo CPU T7100 @ 1.80GHz Memory: 2.4GB Graphics: Intel Corporation Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller (primary) (rev 0c) And I have just installed Elementary OS 0.3 64bit on my HP Compaq 6710s. My problem:- It seems, whenever I am doing some heavy work, here just using chrome and opening 4-5 tabs along with playing youtube video, my OS just freezes and I am shown a black screen, upon which no button works and I just have to restart the computer manually. Can someone please help me figure out what is happening wrong here and how to fix it. Thank you.
You might start by checking whether you have enough memory or swap. 2.4gb is not a lot of memory for this OS. You can check your memory in the terminal application with the simple command: free -mt That will show how much memory you have in the system including swap, and how much is in use. Check the figures before you stress the system, and then again when you provoke it a little. If the memory and swap are filling or full, that may produce a crash. If there appears to be a good memory overhead in RAM and swap, then the next step would be to check the memory integrity with a test of your installed memory. There are plenty of tutorials on this in the Ubuntu documentation, Ubuntu being the distro on which Elementary is based.
@brendantb I think you were right, this is the output of the free -mt command when i am using multiple tabs.... total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 2497 2411 85 185 30 1025 -/+ buffers/cache: 1355 1142 Swap: 1905 80 1825 Total: 4403 2492 1910 In this, the free memory reduced to only 85 out of 2497 where as free swap is 1825 out of 1905....can this be the problem? But I thought linux can be used in less memory devices too and minimum requirement of the elementary is 512MB !!? Anyway is there some solution to this other than increasing my memory?
The lack of memory is probably the cause of your problem. Some linux distributions are designed for low memory use, but Elementary OS is not one of them. I have 8gb on my own system, and frequently use over half of that. Bear in mind that even so called low memory distros will use more memory depending on what other programs you download. Many people using Elementary will use Chromium as the browser which is fast and functional, but it loads a lot of pages into memory to achieve this. So memory usage will depend on the user as much as the distro. The easiest thing to do in your case is to increase the swap partition by another 4gb or 6gb if you have that space to spare on the HDD. This will be slow in memory intensive tasks as the cpu will be writing to the disk a lot. Much better though is to increase the RAM if you can.
In my opinion it's not an issue because of full memory, but if there is a piece of memory broken inside this can be a reason. In general linux is using RAM different than Windows. Your Linux is going to cache everything it can, and only at the moment a program does need new RAM allocated it does remove a bit cache for that request. In your case this means: Total Memory 4403, allocated and 100% in use are 1355mb , the rest 1142mb is free for cache, from this 1025mb is already cached but free to use from every program. Because also Ubuntu/ElementaryOS does have a higher value vm.swappiness, the Kernel is trying to swap every process which really isn't needed anymore and the kernel thinks, its a good idea to swap that (80mb in your case). thats normal. I hope it's a good idea to check the syslog at the time, your system freezes. The good thing of linux is, it (mostly) everytime does provide a logfile for every issue. Could you check the file /var/log/syslog for critical entries at the issue time? for example with nano (i use VIM) or with any document viewer as root: Code (Text): sudo nano /var/log/syslog - Are there any interesting lines with timestamps arround the freeze? - When it freeze, do you still can change the tty login with CRTL+ALT+F1 (your current view is CRTL+ALT+F7)?
