System ground down to a halt

[Colin Law]

On 20 May 2016 at 00:56, MR ZenWiz <mrzenwiz at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Thu, May 19, 2016 at 12:58 AM, Colin Law <clanlaw at gmail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Those are the classic symptoms of running out of RAM, so the system
>> starts swapping memory to disc and gradually the whole machine grinds
>> to a halt.  This can be due to either just not having enough ram to do
>> all the things you are asking for, or because something is behaving
>> badly and consuming more and more memory.  So the first question is
>> how much RAM have you got and how much swap is configured?  How much
>> memory does the windows VM need?
>>
> I have 16GB of RAM with almost 13GB of swap space (holdover from when
> I only had 8GB - never updated).  I'm running on an i7 (effectively 8
> CPUs).
>
> The Win7 VM is allocated 4GB of RAM and 2 CPUs.

Whatever the pros and cons of having a large swap space or not so much
these are off topic to this thread.  The OP described a system that
gets slower and slower and eventually grinds to a halt with constant
disc thrashing.  That cannot be caused by too much swap, and he
certainly has not got too little swap.  Almost certainly he has a
process that is using more and more RAM so it has got to the stage
where it is swapping critical pages to disc and cannot process even
the simplest of actions in a timely manner.

My first guess would be avconv.  Possibly, since you are using 14.04,
it is quite an old version, I don't know.  Alternatively I suppose it
could be a problem using the Wily kernel with 14.04.  Why are you
using a later kernel?

Colin