System ground down to a halt

[Colin Law]

On 19 May 2016 at 01:54, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> I run Xubuntu 14.04 LTS with the Wily kernel (4.2.0-36 #42).  I had a
> fair variety of programs running: several terminal windows, a Chrome
> window, a couple of Seamonkey windows, a VirtualBox Windows 7 VM.  In
> one of the terminals, I was running avconv to convert an m3u8 file
> into an mp4 - that was the one oddball I've never tried before.
>
> The system slowed down to a crawl and finally stopped dead.  While it
> was slowing down, I tried to kill the seamonkey windows, during which
> it seemed to have hung - all response disappeared and nothing was
> going except the disks were thrashing.

Those are the classic symptoms of running out of RAM, so the system
starts swapping memory to disc and gradually the whole machine grinds
to a halt.  This can be due to either just not having enough ram to do
all the things you are asking for, or because something is behaving
badly and consuming more and more memory.  So the first question is
how much RAM have you got and how much swap is configured?  How much
memory does the windows VM need?

Colin