Cinnamon freeze with high disk activity

[inoculator]

Hi all,

for some days now, I experience this behavior, that the GUI stops responding and a high load comes up on the hard drive.
In most cases this ends up infinitive only recoverable by a hard reset.
In some cases the gnome terminal crashes and the login screen returns with a new session.
In one or two rare cases the load disappears after a few minutes and I can continue working.

In most cases I work with KRDC on a remote rdp session or with a flash application in Firefox when this happens.

I tried to use "apport-bug" to get some kind of information, but I am not that familiar with MINT (Linux) to be the best debugging reporter.
The tool returns something like "this is not a unique Ubuntu package" and stops collecting data.

Could someone give me a hand, how to monitor the GUI for a crash report?

Here some basics:
OS: Linux Mint 17.1 Cinnamon 64-bit
C-Ver: 2.4.5
Linux Kernel: 3.13.0-37-generic
Hardware: HP 6530b
CPU: Intel C-Duo 2 P8600 @ 2.4GHz x 2
Mem: 2 GiB
Graphics: Intel Mobile 4 Series Chipset Integrated

thanks for any help

Carsten

[k357k9]

Did you adjust your swappiness? http://community.linuxmint.com/tutorial/view/328

[inoculator]

HI,
thanks for the hint.
No I didn't know that tuning.
It is implemented by now and I will test a while and return a result.

br
Carsten

[k357k9]

Don't forget to reboot!

[Hoser Rob]

It's probably a good idea to decrease swappiness ... contrary to what you read on all those crap blogs is does not always speed things up but it's pretty reliable ... but this sounds like something worse.

I kinda doubt apport-bug is appropriate. Log files would be more useful. Here's a start:

http://superuser.com/questions/610425/f ... ned-frozen

Or just look in /var/log and see what files have changed recently.

[hughjego]

Hi Carsten / Folks

I have exactly the same problem - the system freezes and the hard disk goes nuts. Seems to happen when the memory usage goes above 80% (I've been watching the system monitor).

My system has 2 GB of RAM, and for some reason there seems to be no swap file (system monitor reports "swap not available".)

I'm brand new to Linux, having finally taken the plunge to move away from MS Windows.

Any pointers greatly appreciated.

P.S: I'm only moderately "techie" - and can cut and paste CLI instructions into terminal, however I'm not familiar with how Linux works, key system files etc.... please bear with this noob!

Many Thanks & Best Regards,
Mark