Comment 42 for bug 1152736

I disabled tmpfs when I started seeing this issue, however the swapping has continued, albeit with a lesser number of issues - until today, when the swapping issue was so bad that I performed a hard power down after my laptop had been unresponsive for 24 minutes (clock showed 14:32, I forced a power-down at 14:56).

I couldn't log into any other TTY (it would time out after 60 seconds, or not respond at all), so I couldn't access top or free or anything to try and debug this issue, or even force-kill firefox (which usually solves the problem).

I didn't have many windows open, although I was doing some web development at the time (perhaps 3 or 4 firefox windows, Eclipse, MySQL workbench).

I am also seeing instances where swap is using >3Gb, cache is using >1Gb, and there are no processes running (default desktop only - all other processes/applications stopped). The only way to force the system to stop using swap when there is nothing to swap is to do a hard restart.

Time to also tune background processes I think - the system uses more than 3Gb of physical RAM when idling.