On Sat, 2025-08-16 at 14:54 -0400, rhkramer@gmail.com 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.
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