On Friday, August 15, 2025 07:39:56 PM Van Snyder wrote: > On Sat, 2025-08-16 at 00:33 +0100, alain williams wrote: > > • When the system crashes return to the console and have a look at > > what top is telling you - check especially Memory and Swap use. > > When the system crashes, it is well and truly crashed. The mouse cursor > doesn't move. The keyboard doesn't do anything. Tapping the power > button doesn't do anything. The graphs in GKrellM aren't moving,... And > I can't log in from another computer using ssh. So it's hard to return > to the console and ask what top is telling me.
I'm going to chime in here, even though I am running some older versions of Debian and Firefox (newest is 103). I have found that: * Firefox uses a lot of memory, especially when I have a lot of tabs open * When free memory gets low (maybe to 0), I experience the same systems described by the OP -- everything locks up (and the hard disk light goes on solid). I've taken to do the following: * I keep a konsole window open running top with my firefox window positioned on top of it but offset so I can see the free memory number and the resident memory column. * I pay attention especially to the free memory number, and when it gets low ... * I kill firefox related tasks (not firefox itself), like (in my version of Firefox) "Web Content", "Isolated Web Co", "Privileged Web Co", and "WebExtensions" (as they are named on top). I use a command like =killall -o 12h Content= -- the -o 12h option in hopes of not deleting the most recent versions of those files -- I'm not sure that works ;-) I then find that my tabs still exist, in most cases with the URL, but no content displayed on the page. I can press <F5> on any tab (in the window) to reload the content. (Some tabs, especially searches (ddg and such) don't maintain the URL.) As long as I do this, I avoid the symptoms the OP described.
