This issue is a long time coming. I got a mini pc (Asrock Deskmini h110, i5-6400, 16gb) that I have used for a long time with Kubuntu/Kde Neon, and most of its life, it worked great. Some years ago, it started freezing, especially at Graphic intensive workload, so I thought some hardware issue and converted it into a NAS and it worked absolutely fine as well for a couple of years there too. Recently my wife needed a Windows PC to do some work, and since I had upgraded my NAS, I repurposed the same PC and installed Windows on it, and it worked absolutely fine for her too. Then I decided to check some Graphics intensive workload, like 3d benchmarking stuff, and it didn’t freeze once. I was delighted, and thought maybe I didn’t investigated the issue the first time, and the PC was fine all along. So I reinstalled Debian 13, and lo behold, the issue came back. I found out while I was using IKEA’s 3d kitchen planner. So I replaced distros, and it froze on Ubuntu and CachyOS as well. I tried switching between Wayland and X11, switched browsers, but PC freezes seconds logging into IKEA’s kitchen planner (as soon as 3d graphics are loaded). I reinstalled windows, and my wife has been designing a kitchen in IKEA’s 3d kitchen planner for over an hour now, and it hasn’t frozen once. What’s going on? How do I even investigate this?
I have reinstalled Linux and had sudo dmesg -w running, but no logs are captured before it’s frozen. I have reproduced the issue multiple times now on Linux, and not once it froze on Windows. I have also done memtests, and tried multiple disks both nvme and sata. Also have tried multiple browsers with apt and flatpaks. I really need Lemmy’s collective intelligence to help me here.
Are you sure you are not hitting swap too hard? Windows by default makes a bonkers massive page file, while most distributions try to limit wasting so much for swap.
If so, try installing SwapSpace
I got 12gb swap which I think is plenty. I don’t think that’s the reason.
It’s not about the amount of swap space, it’s a problem that happens when swapping happens for big chunks of data at a time.
Windows aggressively swaps out things way before it’s necessary, you can try increasing the system’s “swappiness”;
I’m writing this from my phone, but when I get to my PC I’ll write out how to do it (unless somebody else does it before I do).You can set it by writing
vm.swappiness=60in a file like/etc/sysctl.d/50-swappiness.conf.The value 60 is arbitrary, if you increase it the system will try to swap out things more aggressively; the name of the file is also partially arbitrary, but AFAIK, it has to begin with two digits — the system will read all the files inside
/etc/sysctl.din order, and the settings in higher-numbered files will be applied over lower ones.Officially, this is the explaination of the vm.swappiness parameter.
You can read and write the value with your shell:
#!/usr/bin/bash sysctl vm.swappiness # shows you the current value sudo sysctl vm.swappiness=69 # sets the swappiness to 69 AND shows you the new valueThis is unrelated but I wonder if I could get better Windows VM performance by disabling swap for the VM. I use an old laptop with slow drive. I wonder if aggressive swapping could be the reason why my Windows machine feels frozen all the time.
Yeah I tried that, didn’t help. I don’t think it’s swap. It has to do with graphics or display driver.
o7, probably worth a shot