Oddball occasional freeze on Dell Inspiron

[MR ZenWiz]

On Sun, Nov 8, 2020 at 1:15 AM Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Sat, 7 Nov 2020 at 19:03, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > My partner is running Xubuntu 18.04 on her main computer, a Dell
> > inspiron 17" laptop we bought new a little over a year ago.  Every
> > once in a while, usually about once a week, the system simply freezes
> > up and stops responding for more than five minutes at a time.
>
> Do you mean that sometimes it freezes but then recovers?  If so is the
> disc light flashing continuously?  If so then you have probably run
> out of RAM and it is continuously swapping memory onto disc.
> Run top or the system monitor and keep an eye on swap, if it starts
> using a significant amount then you need more RAM.
>
> I'll find that light and check it next time this happens.  I don't think
that was showing, and the disk was silent.

I don't recall this ever recovering by itself after the five minute delay
on rebooting.  Other times when it hung up for less time, it recovered, and
I suspect Chrome's memory hogging per tab - she often has a great many tabs
(>10 in more than one window) open at the same time.  We're working on that
one.

However, IMNSHO lots of open tabs in a browser should not cripple the
system.  That's a sign of poor programming in the browser, and Chrome is
the worst offender in this particular regard.  Brave is better, but it has
other demerits and I stopped using it for them (check the web if you're
curious - it's not anywhere near as privacy-protective as it claims).

Thanks.

Mark
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