Re: [gentoo-user] How to keep my system from (nearly) freezing?

[Walter Dnes]

On Sun, Feb 19, 2017 at 01:53:49PM +0100, Helmut Jarausch wrote

> sometime I have some memory hungry ebuilds in the background, when
> I start (e.g.) Chromium which needs very much memory if you have a
> lot of open tabs.
>
> In that case my system nearly freezes. I cannot even kill chrome.
> What can I do in that case. (Remote login doesn't work either)

  You may not like this answer, but here goes...

  Shut down X before emerging memory-hungry ebuilds.  I don't mean
{CTRL}{ALT}{F1} switching to a text console; I mean log out of X
altogether.  Without the memory overhead of X and various programs
running, you'll be able to compile Chromium a lot faster.  Doing that,
I've built Pale Moon (a Firefox fork) from source on an ancient Atom
netbook with 2 gigs of ram in approximately 6 hours.  I had to select
maximum cpu speed and "makeopts=-j3", but it works.

  A few questions...
1) How much ram do you have?
2) How large is your swap partition?
3) Do you use ramdisks?
4) Do you use a lot of space for files in /dev/shm?
5) How much spare space do you have on your hard drive?

-- 
Walter Dnes <waltdnes@××××××××.org>
I don't run "desktop environments"; I run useful applications