On Sat, 26 Dec 2020, Craig Sanders via luv-main wrote:
pps: final alternative: buy more RAM. You owe it to the advertisers and other spies. After all, they're the real owners of your PC.
When I bought the laptop in 2014, I thought "32GB would be enough for *anyone*!". But specifically, looking at what trigger it to crash at 2:14PM yesterday -- munin showed swap usage suddenly started to increase at 2am the night before, 3 hours after I went to bed. Swap started from 0bytes usage, and went straight to 10GB usage: http://rather.puzzling.org/munin-cgi/static/dynazoom.html?plugin_name=dirac%... before ramping up to 64GB and crashing. Why do I remember 2:14? Because at 2:15, having finally wiped my bleary eyes clean and having had 2 espressos from my new christmas present, I then proceeded to my laptop and tried to wake up the screen, and ... zip, nadda. The last syslog was at 2:14 - pulseaudio emitting a faint "Daisy, Daisy / Give me your answer, do". By 2:15, not even magic sysrq responded. `atop` ashowed it was one of the millions of "Web Content" helper threads, although the main firefox-esr process was using a healthy 17GB of RSS before it started being forced out at 1:30am. Actually, the whole behaviour is sus-as: firefox-esr ramps from 7GB to 17GB from 00:10 to 1:30 (23GB VSIZE at 1:30), then ramps down while a "Web Content" ramps up at 06:10 to death-do-us-part. Makes me think it was some kind of mozilla-self-update-behind-the-scenes crap. Oddly enough, this is the first time I've used atop to diagnose processes after the fact. But atop stopped logging after the reboot and didn't recover until today's log rotation cronjob. -- Tim Connors