hi,

I installed LMDE5 few months ago ; since few weeks, having firefox+brave+vivaldi opened, at a moment of huge use of computer (videos, etc), happens a.... dozen hours of freeze (about 72hrs) while absolutely nothing responds until at least 3 days of freezing (!!)

my question would be, to avoid doing a salvage shutdown, how to definitely enable the Out of Memory feature, whom might, I guess, kill too-heavy-memory apps/software?

I found only this, but not the solution:
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...to-a-frozen-os

how could I solve it ?
I thank you vm
best regards

hi guys
since the beginning of the year, where I went from mint oldies, I tried to take a backview and try just linux mint, debian edition, to taste something a bit more stable than ubuntu-likes, plus openbsd.

where browsing a lot with different browsers, brave, firefox or vivaldi, I experienced on several laptops a very uncomfortable freeze while programs where eating lot of memory : it makes the computer freezing for hours, even days -72hrs!- but without any reaction before days, making mouse/kbd totally unusable.

So after dozen of salvage reboot on several computers, thinking it was coming from nvidia chipset, finally it's about Out of Memory /OOM problem. Where under openbsd, I experienced the same, after "less than five minutes" the system killed properly the Xorg process and restarted it, loosing everything but not time because it took just few minutes doing it. With linux, it's looks like during hours, or .... even disabled !

after finding the following subject :
https://unix.stackexchange.com/quest...to-a-frozen-os

I totally agree with that comment :
""When I was talking about this issue on IRC, I have met other Linux users who have experienced this very same problem, so I guess that a lot of users are concerned by this.
To me this is not acceptable since even Windows deals better with high memory usage.""

So I'd like to ask them how they solved it, while I do have a swap partition that Im not comfortable to disable it, where also "You must have 50 reputation to comment" blocks me, how could I get it solved definitely?

I thank you vm

do you mean this: https://neo4j.com/developer/kb/linux...memory-killer/ ?

hi, thank you for answering
yep, probably that tool, but I dont understand at all how to set it up in my system, for having a result of if a browser come to freeze, less than few minutes after it would be killed and system could be usable again (not the case in LMDE5 now), plus why it's not by default enabled (to avoid 72+hrs of freeezing)..
could you help me for that?

I thank you vm

I haven't looked at LMDE in many years, but I'd be surprised if they disabled OOM altogether.

Perhaps you could try earlyoom - with a bit of luck it will be available as a package for you.

So the ultimate issue here is that you're running three browsers and one of them appears to be using too much memory?

Assuming you have sufficient memory/hardware to start with, any form of OOM feature is only going to treat the symptom, not the cause.

So firstly, what is your hardware? (An easy way to answer that is open a terminal and run "inxi -Fz" - provide the output in "[code]..[/code]" tags.)


Next up, does Brave Browser include a miner for its virtual currency? If so, that should be disabled.

What extensions do you have installed in the browsers? It's possible one of them is buggy and causing the problem.

I consider uBlock Origin essential - it's available for all those browsers, and will result in a better browsing experience.


Also, you should periodically monitor your memory use manually - either via System Monitor, or by installing a taskbar applet.

If memory use looks to be above normal (or increasing unexpectedly), check which software/browser(s) is responsible (Processes tab, or via "top"/equivalent), and try to see if any particular tab/extension is using more - with Firefox you can goto the URLs "about:memory" and "about:performance" - there should be something equivalent in the other browsers (try "about:about" to find it).

additionally you may try to check your swap

systemd-oomd should already be enabled. You could also install earlyoom.
I would also suggest using zram instead of a swap file.

No, it is not. I checked on two computers, running LMDE5.
Cause supermagic keystroke are not enabled by default, as shown on the first links of the first post.

How do we do then?
Its simple : as root, do :
it shows:
then, take a binary calculator :
https://www.rapidtables.com/calc/mat...alculator.html

as the first number, enter:
180
as the operation, take "or" (as "|)
then the second number, enter:
64

then calculate. The result could be :
244

If the first number is different than the result, just update :
then, reboot

at restart, you would see that the supermagic key would be enabled.
mainly, super key is generally represented as either "syst" or "printscreen". However, on my laptops, both have distinct "print" and "syst" keys.
So I tried, either :
alt+printscreen+ (k or f)
alt+(Fn/Syst)+(k or f)

[please notice that depending on your model/keyboard/numpad, you may enable or disable numlock to test if it works]

K kills immediately Xorg (worked on my both computers, where on one I had to enable or disable numlock)
F is supposed to kill the over-memory-eating-process


this is what OOM should enable by default, however LMDE5, based on debian looks like to do not allow this, except if you turn on manually. A bit bizarre for a stable-known linux distro.