this is the first time in many years of my GNU/Linux journey that I saw a BSOD. on my office machine BTW. personal machine has never crashed even once.
the crash was due to 100% RAM and swap usage.

image description:
a mobile-clicked photo of a laptop screen. the background is full black with a sad computer image in the middle. the text below it reads: “Oh no! something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can’t recover. Please log out and try again.”
just below it is a small button with the text “log out”

  • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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    9 months ago

    100% RAM is a huge pain on Linux. I have a widget in my taskbar that always shows my RAM usage so I can tell if I’m about to get doinked

      • grue@lemmy.world
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        9 months ago

        Up until yesterday I would’ve said “Firefox” (because I hoard tabs), but it turns the real answer was “Firefox running as a Snap.”

        (A failed update screwed up my Snap installation, which finally gave me the kick I needed to quit procrastinating and excise it from my system once and for all. I’m running Firefox installed via apt package from Mozilla’s PPA, and now – with the same number of tabs open – my system is hovering around 8 GB memory usage, when before it was constantly bouncing off the 32 GB redline.)

        • PainInTheAES@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          Firefox somewhat regularly crashes or freezes up my laptop (16Gb) due to memory usage and I’m running the default Arch package. I ended up installing a memory watchdog that kills processes when they start using too much. Although I do hoard tabs.

      • OsrsNeedsF2P@lemmy.ml
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        9 months ago

        Carelessly running too many programs and not having much RAM.

        When I get my Framework 16, I’ll either get 64 or 128GBs of RAM. It’s so cheap nowadays, the only thing stopping me from getting more is simply the increased time to go to sleep and wake up.

        • squid_slime@lemmy.world
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          9 months ago

          You know your in for a good time when notepad give a warning before hand, ive run into this before filling my 32gb of ram.

        • acockworkorange@mander.xyz
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          9 months ago

          Technically you can create a fixed size pagefile in your disk and mount it as swap workout repartitioning. But Linux doesn’t use swap much regardless of method.

          • Possibly linux@lemmy.zip
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            9 months ago

            It only uses swap under memory pressure. You can configure your swappyness if you want it to be more aggressive

    • exu@feditown.com
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      9 months ago

      There are automated memory killers that should avoid this. I’m using nohang, but systemd also has some module for this.