I have been using debian for about a month now. At first the freezing problem was rare but now it is very periodic. It often happens when I am browsing the web. I used to use Firefox and I thought that the system freezes because of some memory leaks, maybe Firefox takes up too much RAM and hence even virtual console is slow. I had no way to check this hypothesis because even the terminal does not open when the system freezes. Then today I downloaded chrome thinking that it might handle my limited RAM (1GB) well but it freezes even faster, almost after about 30 minutes of browsing. Now, I have really limited knowledge of how the kernel handles memory or allocates the RAM so please inform me about what I should do. I am really clueless and have used all of my googling skills to no avail. Hence this probably the only place where I can find the solution.
Thank you

Extra:
After launching the chrome from terminal I get the following message:
'ATTENTION: default value of option force_s3tc_enable overridden by environment.
[4221:4221:1117/161925:ERROR:desktop_window_tree_host_x11.cc(1547)] Not implemented reached in void views:esktopWindowTreeHostX11::MapWindow(ui::WindowShowState)
getrlimit(RLIMIT_NOFILE) failed'

In spite of this chrome starts and works normally. Now I would think that this error has something to do with freezing but then again firefox launches itself quite normally from the terminal.

Welcome to LQ, hope you like it here. Let's start at the beginning.
What version of Debian are you running?
Is it up to date?
Did this problem start from the beginning or after some updates?
And what hardware are you using?
Does this problem also occur when using another OS (if any)?

*BTW, please note posting duplicate threads, like you did here: https://www.linuxquestions.org/quest...ow-4175525628/, is frowned upon. Please do not do that again.

please open 2 terminal windows before the freeze occurs. in one, start top or, even better, htop (htop has a nice gui. make sure that it sorts by cpu usage, not sure it's doing that by default).

now start firefox.
when the freeze happens, look at htop and see what is eating your cpu. in the other terminal window you can type "killall firefox" and see if that restores everything to normal.

you might have to wait for minutes even for the mouse to move, or to get some reaction on your clicks, but please be patient.
this is for troubleshooting - if it works we know that your assumption was correct. if not, we'll try something different.

also post what unspawn requested.

I am really sorry about that, I was not sure that it got posted. Thank you for the reply @unspawn and ondoho, I have not tried it but will try. Also sorry for the late response, internet was down where I live.