Comment 38 for bug 1833281

Please refer also to this bug report. It is the same problem and has existed for eleven (11!) years if one can believe that.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux/+bug/159356

I personally experience this on two 4GB laptops running live versions (no swap) of Debian 8.6 - 9.4, Fedora 25 - 28, Ubuntu, with a myriad of shells; Gnome, Mate, Cinnamon, KDE, etc. (One laptop I expanded to 8GB now but it doesn't matter- it just take a little longer to freeze the system.)

Various browsers from Firefox52 to current Developers 60, Chrome and Chromium

Certain combos eat up memory faster (Gnome has a memory leak for example in which it consumers memory for every window drawn and NEVER relinquishes that memory, without a restart to gnome-shell), new Firefox or Chrom* vs older ESR versions (54 and under) of FF eat up memory much more quickly.

Under the best combo/circumstances, I can open up 25-30 FF tabs before the system SUDDENLY SEIZES (observe the "USB live stick" light flashing non-stop, as if swapping, even tho no swap on Live versions). If not caught within literal seconds to Ctrl-Alt-F5 to an opened root console where I can kill the FF ps and save this "live" session, the computer is entirely unresponsive and requires power cycling.

In rare instances, some 10's of minutes later or even hours (4,8 12) later, the system *might* finally respond to the request to drop to the console. Keystrokes to issue the kill command can take minutes per key, but if successful, I've seen the load reported after the kill as high as 75.

Truly amazing.

It's difficult to fathom this critical a bug in memory management has gone un-addressed/un-noticed for so long but alas. I can't recall but I've read this behavior ONLY occurs on 64-bit kernels, and is un-reproducible on 32-bit kernels.

Also, on non-"live" installs, with swap configured, one can watch the hard drive light come on and remain solid to the same effect. Power cycle time. I've read from others, that they've determined swap isn't even really being used, so not sure what the "read" thrashing going on is (and it must be read thrashing because on Live versions there's no swap and the USB drive light is steady active also).

I just run Linux to not run Windows. Basic browsing, text document editing, file management, a few cli's and an instant messaging program typically opened simultaneously. Nothing computationally heavy but memory intensive (at least for the web browser) for sure.

STILL- difficult to believe the OS cannot handle this situation with some sort of message, or killing a window/throwing an error about an opened Firefox tab or something-- rather, it simply fills up the memory (I watch on gnome-system-status/Resources tab now) to 99% and then it's too late.

I really don't know technically how the Out Of Memory killer works/is supposed to work, but it sure isn't doing anything here.