Bad memory/swap management in 17.10?

[Luca Olivetti]

Under memory pressure the machine becomes totally unresponsive (with the 
hard disk light constantly lit up due to heavy swapping, I suppose), 
until I reset it (once I waited up to an hour to see if it recovered 
with no luck).
It happens often enough that it's becoming annoying.

Before the upgrade to 17.10, the same workload (see below) didn't cause 
the lock-up: the machine would be unresponsive for a short while (a few 
seconds) but then it recovered and was usable again.

Details:
I have 8GB of memory, one virtualbox virtual machine with 3.5GB 
assigned, firefox, thunderbird and the plasma desktop (oh, and konsole 
with several tabs).
The lockup happens after a few hours when I try to open a document with 
openoffice or a pdf with okular (after a restart I can open those same 
documents with no problem).

Since the whole system has been upgraded I cannot say if the problem is 
the kernel, virtualbox, firefox, thunderbird or any other component.
I cannot find anything in syslog, so I cannot say if the OOM is trying 
to do its job or not.

I can reset the machine ( a dell latitude e6530) either with the power 
button or with the sysrq magic key combination.

Am I the only one seeing this?

Bye
-- 
Luca