I recently noticed that my laptop is freezing and rebooting randomly, especially when I open Steam and some other applications. Based on the logs I checked, the out-of-memory (OOM) killer might have something to do with it. I got some details from the logs that show systemd-oomd was executing and considering cgroups for killing but didn't actually kill anything. My laptop specs are: 11th Gen Intel® Core™ i5-1135G7 processor, Intel® Iris® Xe Graphics, 7.5 GiB of RAM, and 1 TB HDD (planning to add an SSD). I'm running Ubuntu LTS 24.04 with GNOME 3.36.8. Can someone tell me if this behavior is related to the OOM killer, and how I can prevent my laptop from freezing like this again?
1 Answer
You might want to look into increasing your swap space, or check if zswap is enabled. With 8GB of RAM, it should be okay for general tasks, but gaming can demand more, especially if you're using Steam. Ubuntu and GNOME typically use around 1 to 2 GB just on their own, so keeping an eye on your memory usage can help. Try running `watch free -m` in a terminal to monitor memory use in real-time. Just a thought!
I just increased my swap to 12GB. Should I also consider disabling the OOM killer?