I have had similar behaviour increasingly, it seems, over the last several months. I don't run Skype; this lockup happens on a machine that really is not doing much apart from several desktops running terminal windows and browser sessions, plus sometimes an OpenOffice spreadsheet or a PDF doc viewer.
What I have observed is that the red LED on the disk drive goes into overtime, CPU and memory use both hit the ceiling, swap use increases monotonically as does load average. At that time I probably won't be able to get a new shell window up, nor get a ssh connection. Ctrl-Alt-Fn might get as far as 'login:' but not as far as a prompt. Strange thing is an existing htop screen (when X gets round to letting me see it) does not show any process(es) in particular hogging CPU or memory. I concluded it was just disk thrashing due to swap demand, as Ralph suggests; but was surprised to not see evidence in htop. Generally I 'recover' by finding the PIDs of the parent Chrome processes and killing those. This system is still running Ubuntu 10.04LTS. I while ago I moved it to an LXDE desktop which seems to have improved things. best regards, Victor Churchill, Bournemouth -- Next meeting: Bournemouth, Tuesday 2012-06-12 20:00 Meets, Mailing list, IRC, LinkedIn, ... http://dorset.lug.org.uk/ New thread on mailing list: mailto:[email protected] How to Report Bugs Effectively: http://goo.gl/4Xue
