© 2004
Canonical Ltd.
•
Terms of use
•
Data privacy
•
Contact Launchpad Support
•
Blog
•
Careers
•
System status
•
0e1f616
(Get the code!)
I can confirm this phenomenon on a Dell Dimension with a Pentium D CPU, 2G RAM, running a 64 bit kernel and nVidia card with official nVidia driver. Swappiness is set to 10.
It appears the system is swapping intensely when it becomes unresponsive, and sometimes freezes for several minutes with only occasional mouse pointer updates. The %iowait of the CPU is typically above 80 during these episodes. It usually happens when running some memory intensive application(s) (e.g. Chrome with many tabs, Eclipse or VirtualBox), so it could very well be caused by an actual shortage of RAM (disappointingly meaning 2 GB is only sufficient for casual desktop use nowadays).
I would however generally have expected the kernel to handle the resource shortage better, and not effectively suspend every running process, as well as mouse and keyboard input, for up to ten minutes. Especially at times when only one of the memory hungry applications is being actively used, as the others should be able to be swapped out completely leaving enough free RAM.