> I feel like we are missing a trick here. Even with a relatively slow I/O > device (I was faintly amused to see SSD in the list of relatively slow > devices, if SSD is slow what is fast?) it should eventually catch up > UNLESS something is generating an insane amount of I/O over a sustained > period. Just browsing the web shouldn't do that unless RAM is very > tight, and the O/P indicated they have lots of RAM.
> So, I think the O/P should look into what is causing all the I/O in the > first place, and why that I/O is sustained even when most of the > processes on the system are blocked. Something isn't right there. The > usual suspect would be swapping but again the O/P said they have > "large-capacity RAM" and were just browsing the web with or without > LibreOffice open -- this shouldn't trigger swapping. Introducing swap reduced lockups because OOM situations decreased. Firefox is still incredibly broken. Even simple websites lock up my computer. But most other programs outside of Steam are OK. So I just use Chromium right now and the system seems relatively stable. My research suggests that I may have omitted important information in my initial report. I've installed Buster on btrfs partitions on top of LVM in an encrypted partition. I read something that seemed to say that OOM killer waits for writes to complete before killing programs, but the LVM needs memory to finish writing. So the system locks up and the hard drive thrashes even though nothing productive gets done. Can anyone corroborate this? Another post suggested that browsers need a lot of I/O for caching. This creates a lot of overhead that could lock up a sub-optimal or buggy file system configuration. The suggestion is that btrfs isn't well-suited to many small writes - its trees get imbalanced and fragmentation increases. This seems consistent with my experience that I get a lot of hard drive activity on web browsing even with swap off. Am I on the right track? So is my encrypted LVM + btrfs at least somewhat to blame? Should I consider wiping and reloading onto a simpler encrypted file system setup (either btrfs or ext4)? I like the flexibility that LVM provides in being able to tune partitions after-the-fact (and I'm not comfortable with sub-volumes yet), but I'd rather have OOM killer able to do its job.
