RAM management/ Memory heavy applications

justMe

Hi,

For the last couple of months (since installing the Solus Budgie 4.4 ISO) applications that are heavier on RAM - Firefox, Falkon, Opera, Brave, Thunderbird - started crashing, auto-closing or restarting when I hit about the half of the available system memory. Rhythmbox also hangs and pretty much everything besides Transmission and Sublime Text/Gedit is giving me a hard time. I barely have a couple of days without any of these failing - Firefox already restarted 3 times today.
This is on a desktop computer with the Ryzen 5 2400G (Vega APU/IGPU) and 16GBs dual channel RAM. I have also set a 2GBs swap partition ever since I assembled this PC.
I noticed that ZRAM is now enabled by default. Could this be to blame since the issue starts when the used memory gets in the 6+ GBs range (about 2 Gbs are shared memory for the on-chip Vega graphics)? With the previous install I've regularly hit 12+ GBs of used memory experiencing no issues at all.
Could ZRAM be disabled for the sake of testing and if so, what is the proper way to do that?
The only other difference between the two installs which I can think of is switching to PipeWire. Not sure if it could help any, but can it switch back to PulseAudio just to rule this out too?

Many thanks in advance!

Axios

justMe If your having problems with everything in general I would say
its hardware related are you overclocking?
Just my opinion on what you commented on.
Dual channel ram will show issues quicker.
Take out one ram stick and try it.

ReillyBrogan

It's probably not zram, but you can disable zram by following the instructions in this link: https://raw.githubusercontent.com/getsolus/packages/main/packages/z/zram-generator/files/zram.conf

justMe

ReillyBrogan Thanks! Seems like it's not zram after all - just happened again. Anything else I should try?

Axios The CPU and RAM have been overclocked and working like that for more than 5 years now. I suppose I will bring back the stock frequencies if nothing else helps. The reason I never thought of that is it all started with installing the 4.4 ISO. Thanks!

TraceyC

While it doesn't seem like other instances of RAM having errors, it might be something to test as well. I'd recommend running Memtest86+ to make sure the memory hardware is OK.

elfprince

TraceyC recommend running Memtest86+

Not in Solus repo?

justMe

I would like to thank you all, guys!
I was actually starting to get optimistic after 3 full days without issues - I just turned off "Hardware acceleration" in Firefox. Except for some choppy scrolling everything was running smooth (and actually still is) 😃

TraceyC Thanks for reminding me about Memtest86+
I was able to test my RAM today and it turns out one of the banks has failed (a couple bits on it). Errors begin stockpiling when Memtest gets in the 13-14 GB range (both, the lowest and highest addresses are at 13.3 GBs). Will see if I find the time to test if 8GBs + zram enabled will be enough, but I'm not sure this is my thing. I might be looking for a new pair of sticks (or a new PC) 😆

elfprince Download the ISO, unzip it and restore the extracted ISO image (I used Disks) on a FAT32 formatted USB drive. Then boot your system from this drive. At least that's what I did 🙂
Just to note that I had to download the ISO with GRUB, since otherwise my keyboard was not initializing.

Harvey

elfprince

No. Memtest should be ran from a live environment. Which is why their site provides .ISO downloads instead of .rpm / .deb etc.

elfprince

Harvey Yes, just saw that iso file on their site. Although still don't know how to use it. I tried unzipping their source download file, but that created several directories which I have no idea how to use. So, erased all. 😃

nolan

I guess is for a live usb or cd

Axios

I enabled zram early on had two cheap computers with just 2gig ram not my main machines
but I do use them.
It did help things out but was not the issue brave was (no issues to date) can run two browsers
youtube and all no crashes.
Sorry my point was I think solus is very stable in the memory department.
I am out of touch with amd since I went all intel.

ReillyBrogan

Well, getting unstable at the ₅₀% memory mark really sounds like a hardware issue. IE, there are two RAM sticks and one of them has gone bad but issues aren't apparent until the OS actually starts trying to use the bad sectors. If the sticks are user replaceable then perhaps you could try swapping them and seeing if the issues start sooner? That would be very strong evidence that the hardware is indeed at fault. You could leave one stick out at a time until you figured out which one it is.

synth-ruiner

justMe Download the ISO, unzip it and restore the extracted ISO image (I used Disks) on a FAT32 formatted USB drive

an .iso file is a byte-for-byte copy of an entire filesystem, so just by writing those bytes directly to a USB stick you're creating a filesystem. there's no need to format the drive first 🙂

Axios

justMe Makes sense then that you would start to have issues on heavy usage
as ram filled up or even intermittent normal issues.
I was reading up on your model and the issues people had voltage seemed to be an issue on memory
(when overclocking) so I would prob replace both if that is the route you take. (to keep them the same)
Glad you found something.

justMe

Axios I agree that higher than normal voltages end up components' estimated lifecycle much sooner but ... The RAM is rated for 1.35V and the voltage reading from my motherboard is 1.328V despite I have it set to 1.36V (just to make sure it stays stable at ₁.33V). I did check what is the voltage "Auto" setting reading with the lowest frequency A-XMP profile and it was the same - 1.328V. I actually need to bring DDR voltage up to 1.38V to see it stabilized at 1.35V.
Nevertheless, now I have a dilemma 😃
I was looking for the latest gen APUs with 32GBs RAM (not really keen on it as my PC still suits me well) but I never felt the effect of ZRAM (due to the faulty RAM). I was constantly at the 6-12GBs used memory range with the previous install and I'm always future-proofing but am not sure if I'll really need 32GBs anytime soon (provided ZRAM backs me up). Might just really go for the test after all - the healthy 8GBs stick + ZRAM - to try estimate what would I need 🙂