SliTaz Forum

Guest

Guest

No more RAM : critical issue ?

Firefox freezes and freezes my whole system.  This comes when no more RAM in Live session ? 

On the the other hand, how can we unblock a freezed Slitaz ?

Ctrl + ALt + Del ?

Guest

Guest

Re: No more RAM : critical issue ?

there is a way to prevent slitaz to use ALL the RAM when on Live ? 

I mean,for exemple, if I load my /root/Desktop with full of stuff, what happen if

all the RAM ?

eriksenb

Member

Registered: 2011-06-25

Posts: 11

Re: No more RAM : critical issue ?

On Slitaz 3.0 stable: After many months of putting up with these Firefox crashes as you describe when running out of memory on an old system with limited RAM that I use everyday with a customized live-USB drive (rather than live CD), I finally just a few days ago figured out that the problem largely disappears if you format a USB stick (or part thereof) as Linux swap and boot with it attached to the system. I suspect I could have created a second partitioin for the swap on the same USB stick but I used another one I had lying around. Slitaz auto detects a swap partition on the USB stick at boot so no need to manually turn swap on either. I've pushed this pretty hard in Firefox on a system with 756MB RAM. Now, instead of crashing, Slitaz will use a little swap space and I can open something like 25+ tabs while watching a flash video compared with before (without swap) where firefox would crash with probably 7-10 tabs open under the same circumstances. I'm very happy with this workaround...hope it works for you. It seems that in Slitaz 3 the memory cache isn't released as I thought it would and eventually Firefox consumes all the memory causing the crash. My old workaround was just checking on memory available and quiting Firefox. I never did figure out how to manually release system memory cache.

eriksenb

Member

Registered: 2011-06-25

Posts: 11

Re: No more RAM : critical issue ?

BTW, another approach to relieve the RAM disk memory needed (e.g., files in /home/tux/Desktop) is to point your home directory to a USB stick (or other persistent writable medium). If you're using a live USB flash drive, you can just point to a home directory on the same USB stick that you use to boot with. This is well documented somewhere and easy to switch to...but don't recall at the moment where/how. Hope this helps.

eriksenb

Member

Registered: 2011-06-25

Posts: 11

Re: No more RAM : critical issue ?

To avoid rebooting (CTRL-ALT-DEL) if your X session is locked up, you can try CTRL-ALT-BACKSPACE to kill it. Or maybe try CTRL-ALT-2 to switch to another screen/terminal session and login as root and then kill the X session (Kill -9 <PID>. Then switch back to the original screen/terminal with CTRL-ALT-1.