[arch-general] i3wm (randomly?) freezes; SIGCONT seems to fix it

[David N Murray]

On 09/17/2016 07:33 AM, Ludwig Zins wrote:
> Hi all,
>
> I had two random freezes too. One after a screenlock and the second one
> during using Chromium. The second freeze wasn't a complete one. Mouse
> moves were delayed approx. 30s and were very stuttering. I only could do
> a hard reset.
>
> I noticed, that despite my memory isn't used completly (3GB/4GB) 50% of
> my swap space are used. Further I see chromium uses a lot of swap space
> (approx. 450MB). I don't know if this is an indication of the problem. I
> never checked the usage of swap before.
>
> My setup:
> i3 4.12
> py3status 3.1rc0
> Chromium 53
> xautolock 2.2
>
>
>
> Regards
> Ludwig
>
I've had 2 lockups during the last week, too, but I wasn't on the 
machine when they happened.  Not sure if it's related, but in my case, 
it was a desktop machine and the whole system froze (sshd wasn't 
answering, either).  I'm not seing any indication of what's happening in 
journalctl, other than journalctl stops recording anything at a certain 
time.

I've also see the increased swap usage over the last few months. I went 
through the swap page at https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/Swap and 
https://rudd-o.com/linux-and-free-software/tales-from-responsivenessland-why-linux-feels-slow-and-how-to-fix-that 
and saw no change. Every morning I come down to something like this:

$ free -m
               total        used        free      shared buff/cache   
available
Mem:          15998        3345         421         240 12230       12080
Swap:         16383        1374       15009

And all my apps appear to be swapped out (Chromium, Thunderbird, even a 
locked KeePassX). I do run backups overnight and imagine that the 
buff/cache is filling up with directories and pushing out the actual 
apps.  I'm thinking about disabling swap at this point, since I don't 
really do anything with the box that requires swap space, or approaches 
16G of ram.

Dave