system becomes unresponsive after briefly running out of memory

[enb]

I was running a calculator program, qalculate, and after running a large calculation, the system started to stutter, so I stopped the and closed the calculator, but even after that, the system remained very slow and mostly unresponsive. I managed to get to a terminal via ctlr alt f1 and from there use top, which told me that the cpu and memory were freed up, but the system was still unresponsive.

[Peter Clifton (pcjc2)]

Once you've run out of memory and started hitting swap, the memory previously used as cache for other running programs will be dropped, or inactive pages paged out to disk.

This does make things very slow and unresponsive for a while, but the system _should_ recover. Did your system recover eventually, or was it unresponsive until you rebooted?

Can you reproduce the issue every time yuo try the calculation?

[enb (elitenoobboy)]

Yes, I did it again and it happened. After the program is closed there is no hard drive activity and the system stays unresponsive for at least 5 minutes.