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Why the system becomes unresponsive before system total memory be reached ?

I've 2G DDR3 installed (1802MB usable) but when memory usage reach ~1450MB the system starts to be unresponsive and stay freezing until the memory usage reduce.

% uname -r
3.14.11-1-lts

% free -m
              total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          1802       1614        187        147        189        301
-/+ buffers/cache:       1123        679
Swap:         1023        206        817

To monitor memory usage I'm using a awesome wm widget.

Swap read speeds:

 % sudo hdparm -tT /dev/sda5

 /dev/sda5:
 Timing cached reads:   3958 MB in  2.00 seconds = 1979.41 MB/sec
 Timing buffered disk reads: 130 MB in  3.02 seconds =  43.03 MB/sec

Swap write speeds (not swap to be precise, but write speed to disk partition):

 # dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/sda5 bs=8k count=500000
 54587+0 records in
 54587+0 records out
 447176704 bytes (447 MB) copied, 7.81582 s, 57.2 MB/s
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9
  • Take a look at the system log. If the OOM killer is active, the system is in trouble. Otherwise, the swap is probably slow as hell.
    – Daniel B
    Jul 18, 2014 at 18:54
  • Your system become slow because your swap is using 206MB. This is to be expected.
    – Ramhound
    Jul 18, 2014 at 18:55
  • @DanielB I don't know how to check if OOM killer is active. I've updated question with swap partition speeds.
    – Victor Aurélio
    Jul 18, 2014 at 19:24
  • @Ramhound your comment make no sense to me, since the swap resides in disk, how can this affect memory usage ? can you explain your comment please.
    – Victor Aurélio
    Jul 18, 2014 at 19:25
  • Read speeds for swap are only 1 part, what are the write speeds like?
    – cybernard
    Jul 18, 2014 at 19:42

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