munocat wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2019 10:58 pm
Yeahthisisausername wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2019 10:39 pm
munocat wrote: ↑Fri Mar 22, 2019 10:20 pm
New chromium is freezing up my system. Lucky I can ssh and reboot. I also noticed a lot of chromium threads in htop.
How's your swap? Note that your system will 100% hang and freeze if you let the system fill its RAM to 100%, which will happen the moment it can't swap. Swap is set at 100MB at default, which is ridiculous, but also understandable. If you want to use your Pi as a desktop computer, get a cheap SSD. You'll kill your MicroSD if you increase swap.
HOWEVER, it won't kill your MicroSD right away. I ran mine from an SD with a swap file of 2048 MB for about a month, and nothing happened, and performance was much better. I highly recommend that you get an SSD if you're using your Pi as a regular computer though. It works just fine as a daily driver, as long as you stay away from YouTube (it's a YouTube problem, and not a Pi problem).
Here's a demonstration of my setup that contains a 3B+, SSD, 192 vRAM, 2048 SWAP.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P-EQ77KijWI&t=1s
Notice the lack of lag and pauses. It's even better with Chromium v72. That's what an SSD will basically give you. A MicroSD is NOT made for general computing. It's made for handling one operation at the time, while an SSD, which is located in every single modern computer, is made for handling a massive amount of data at the same time. A 120 GB SSD, will not cost you more than $20-30 these days. I'm using a Kingston A400 (120 GB).
I'm clearly rambling now, so I'll wrap it up here.
I have a 2048 swap, maybe I should add an ssd. Currently I am using a 3b, all my 3b+ are in a 6 pi case running
[email protected] System started hang after chromium update. I am not running heavy demanding sites, just 5-6 forum/how toos. It freezes the mouse and keyboard.
Alright, doesn't seem like any heavy tasks that would write to swap (SDcard) that much, but again, an SD card is not made for this. If you run "htop" in a terminal, it'll show you how much swap, or "swp" it currently uses. Don't worry about its current state since swap doesn't work like RAM, so it won't suddenly drop in memory usage, even though you close Chromium. It'll work more like a cache, making things faster the next time you open X. A reboot will however clear out swap.
Also, yes, I would add an SSD either way. If your setup is currently reading and writing a lot to and from disk (SD Card), then I would get an SSD. If R/W activity is low, then you'll be fine. Also, if you're running a headless system, then I'd uninstall Chromium, because why would you need it?
EDIT: Forgot to mention WHY you're experiencing the freezes and hangs. When the system has filled up RAM and SWAP, it's filled, and there are no places to go. If you increase SWAP, then you'll at least have a buffer. So if you browse the web, and the system needs more than 1 GB of RAM, which is ALWAYS with Chromium, it'll move cache to SWAP. If the SWAP file/partition isn't big enough (like it is at default), it'll fill up, and the system won't have any other ways out of the pickle it's currently in. A 2048 MB swap file is overkill. I'm using the same, and I have never ever seen it use more than 6-700 MB of SWAP, and that's after an up-time of 20+ days.
