KDE Neon crashes with 3 application running

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1

Hi all, I have ~2 years old laptop with 16GB RAM (see below). I installed KDE Neon with Plasma 6 and Wayland (default options). I gave it 1GB SWAP because I always want system to use predominantly RAM, now SWAP. See full detail below.

Today I had few apps opened and started copying files from /home to my phone SD card (connected through USB) and KDE killed Firefox saying it has run out of memory. I never seen that before - System runs at 30% RAM utilisation (4.9GB) with those apps running. How can I check what killed my memory? Is there any log I can look for ?

I had those apps running:

  • Firefox with 34 tabs (I always run multiple tabs)
  • Evolution email (background)
  • Dolphin
  • Terminal
  • Radiotray playing music (through bluetooth to my external speaker)

SYSTEM

  Kernel: 6.11.0-26-generic arch: x86_64 bits: 64
  Desktop: KDE Plasma v: 6.3.5 Distro: KDE neon 24.04 6.3 noble
  Machine yype: Laptop System
  Battery:   ID-1: BAT1 charge: 46.4 Wh (100.0%) condition: 46.4/45.8 Wh (101.2%)
  CPU:  Info: quad core model: 11th Gen Intel Core i7-1185G7 bits: 64 type: MT MCP cache: L2: 5 MiB
  Speed (MHz): avg: 951 min/max: 400/4800 cores: 1: 647 2: 400 3: 1143   4: 1095 5: 1128 6: 1031 7: 970 8: 1196
 Graphics: Intel TigerLake-LP GT2 [Iris Xe Graphics] driver: i915 v: kernel
 Display: wayland server: X.org v: 1.21.1.11 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.6
    compositor: kwin_wayland driver: X: loaded: modesetting unloaded: fbdev,vesa
    dri: iris gpu: i915 resolution: 1: 1920x1200 2: 1920x1080 3: 2256x1504
  API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: iris,swrast
    platforms: gbm,wayland,x11,surfaceless,device
  API: OpenGL v: 4.6 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: intel mesa
    v: 24.2.8-1ubuntu1~24.04.1 renderer: Mesa Intel Xe Graphics (TGL GT2)
  API: Vulkan v: 1.3.275 drivers: N/A surfaces: xcb,xlib,wayland
Audio:
  Device-1: Intel Tiger Lake-LP Smart Sound Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
  Device-2: HP USB Audio driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
  API: ALSA v: k6.11.0-26-generic status: kernel-api
  Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.2.6 status: active
Bluetooth:
  Device-1: Intel AX201 Bluetooth driver: btusb type: USB
  Report: hciconfig ID: hci0 state: up bt-v: 5.2
Drives:
  Local Storage: total: 1.14 TiB used: 403.96 GiB (34.5%)
  ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Samsung 
    size: 238.47 GiB
  ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Samsung 
    size: 931.51 GiB type: USB
Partition:
  ID-1: / size: 35.81 GiB used: 23.47 GiB (65.5%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/nvme0n1p3
  ID-2: /boot/efi size: 598.8 MiB used: 7.8 MiB (1.3%) fs: vfat
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p1
  ID-3: /home size: 195.55 GiB used: 97.75 GiB (50.0%) fs: ext4
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p4
Swap:
  ID-1: swap-1 type: file size: 512 MiB used: 349.1 MiB (68.2%)
    file: /swapfile
  ID-2: swap-2 type: partition size: 1.46 GiB used: 514.9 MiB (34.3%)
    dev: /dev/nvme0n1p2
Sensors:
  System Temperatures: cpu: 40.0 C mobo: N/A
  Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A
Info:
  Memory: total: 16 GiB note: est. available: 15.46 GiB used: 4.15 GiB (26.8%)
  Processes: 298 Uptime: 5h 12m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.34
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2

Hi - I’m not an expert in that area, but just to check - did the message that you saw look like this, just with Firefox instead of Konsole?

image
image355×254 37.7 KB

If so, then that was the Linux kernel’s out-of-memory killer getting triggered - to look at the kernel logs and get a lead on where else to go, you could use the journalctl command. For example, to look at the kernel logs from the previous time the device was booted up, you could use the terminal command sudo journalctl --boot=-1 --dmesg. At the time of the out-of-memory event, you’d see lines that look like this:

image
image1139×724 110 KB

The section of the system journal around that time would at least hopefully give some context for further investigation :slight_smile:

3

Thank you. It was indeed that message. I removed Neon because of multiple issues which I was experiencing and switched to Kubuntu… just to discover that some of the issues are similar. I will open new thread now

4

Yeah if you are running into the out of memory issue you might want to first make sure your swap is on, second look at reducing the number of tabs open in your browser (that may tabs will have a huge impact on the amount of RAM you are eating up) and three possibly look at increasing the amount of RAM your computer has. I had the same issue with this and I did all three of these things with ultimately moving to more RAM which resolved everything.