Comment 37 for bug 1833281

Hi,

I’ve experienced what I believe is the same problem. The problem has gone away completely for me after I bumped vm.min_free_kbytes way up to 393216.

As soon as the system ran out of physical memory, the system would freeze for at least 2 minutes and often up to 45 minutes. GNOME desktop would stop. I could move the mouse cursor, and ping the system from a remote computer; but not connect over SSH or do anything other than wave the mouse about. The system clock on the top of GNOME would stop updating for 45 minutes. (Maaaybe it would move forward 1 minute after 20 minutes and still be 19 minutes out of sync.)

I've been having this issue for years on multiple different computer configurations with 8+ GiB of memory and large SWAP partitions. I never saw more than maybe 5 MiB in use on the SWAP partition. After tuning min_free_kbytes, the SWAP partition is now being used properly and the system only does the occasional (and expected) 1 second stutter when running low on physical memory.

I also run Fedora and have kept up with the latest stable release.

Aside 1: The issue would persist with SWAPOFF, just like Steven Haigh describes.
Aside 2: The problem happen much more frequently when I used BtrFS. After switching to XFS, this happen less frequently (weekly instead of daily).