On Sat, 2025-08-16 at 14:54 -0400, [email protected] wrote: > 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).
According to the "Mem" meter in GKrellM and occasional uses of "free," the total memory in use is rarely above 60%. So that's not the reason for the crashes. > 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.
