It started freezing maybe a month or two ago. It happens anytime between a few seconds after the OS loads, to hours or days later. I do not recall downloading anything around when this issue began that could be suspect.

I’ve put off fixing this because I have no idea how to even begin troubleshooting it. Internet searches for “Linux freezes” returns practically countless potential problems.

What are some recommendations? I have my root directory on a 30 GB partition separate from my home directory, which I think makes reinstalling my base image (Debian) easy without losing personal data, so that’s an option. Maybe there’s a system log file that would provide some insight?

I’m Linux dumb so please teach me how to fish!

I’ll add that my Windows install (on a separate drive) doesn’t freeze, and my Linux install is on a new Samsung drive that didn’t report issues, so the problems unlikely hardware related.

02:05 18OCT: Thanks for all the quick responses, a lot of helpful suggestions so far. I should clarify that “my computer freezes” means it is 100% unresponsive until it is rebooted. Ctrl+alt+del spam or changing terminal sessions gets a response. The last few entries in my most recent journalctl boot outputs are different from one another, and the I did not see any errors. For now, I’ll boot a live USB and let it sit for while, see if it crashes again.

  • Agility0971@lemmy.world
    1·
    10 hours ago

    You need to figure out what is the source of such freeze. Enable REISUB combo and systemds ctrl+alt+delete spam reboot

    What to do on next freeze:

    • is the freeze sudden or does the system gets progressively slower? Does the mouse curser respond to your actions? Does the audio keep playing in the background?
    • Try changing tty ctrl+alt+fN. Does anything happen at all?
    • once system hangs again. Try ctrl+alt+del spam does it work? If not the systemd is irresponsive
    • try REISUB

    This will help in pinpointing the source of the hang and what kind of hang it is.

    What you could do:

    • use remote system and monitor the logs: ssh faulty_host journalctl -b0 -k --follow > faulty_host_journal.log
    • monitor (somehow) time series metrics of the system. Eg ram, disk usage, cpu metrics. Some kind of plot could reach a saturated value before hanging. This needs quite some setup though.
    • configure more aggressive OOM killer
    • check also some settings in /etc/systemd. There are some options for auto rebooting on hangs and crashes if I recall. Light be worth lokking in to.
    • GooseFinger@sh.itjust.worksOP
      1·
      8 hours ago

      Thanks for the comment.

      It froze again tonight, I tried ctr+alt+del spam and nadda, no response.

      I have not tried changing tty ctrl+alt+fn, but I will in the next session. Same with REISUB (not sure what this is yet).

      My first guess for root cause was a ram leak, but my system monitor shows little activity when these crashes/freezes occur. Not that this is a perfect method of ruling this out, but my resource usage doesn’t smell fishy at least.