This is a static archive of the old Zorin Forum.

The information below may be outdated. Visit the new Zorin Forum here ›

If you have registered on the old forum, you will need to create an account on the new forum.

Prevent system freeze when app runs out of memory

dandv

Sat Dec 29, 2012 9:31:44 am

I was testing Zorin OS 6 from a Live USB. I have 4GB of RAM in my Dell E6410.

After opening a few memory intensive tabs (Gmail, Google Spreadsheet), Chrome apparently ran out of memory (I also had WINE running). The problem is that Chrome took down the entire system with it - the mouse cursor started to jump, I couldn't close other applications, and clicking the close button on Chrome's window took SEVERAL MINUTES to terminate Chrome. In the meantime, System Monitor would show memory usage close to 2.0GB (~50%) and CPU utilization around 50% for all four cores.

This is bad. If a process runs out of memory, the OS should remain stable.

Same problem on Ubuntu 12.10, though to a lesser extent (Chrome is faster to close a tab, which saves the situation).

On Windows 7, I would get an alert that memory was running out, and I could close tabs or other applications. Seems like on Ubuntu, the system just becomes unresponsive.

To make Zorin more user friendly, a user-friendly frontend to a memory-limiting mechanism like ulimit or cgroups should be used.