"Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

Having had the privilege to use the Summit N900 for almost a month now, I'd like to discuss how to handle "Out of memory" errors and UI freezes that sometimes occur on the N900. (extras-testing enabled and apps in use).

From time to time, the device gives "out of memory errors". Sometimes the message can be ignored, other times the battery has to be removed. I have been assuming apps from extras-testing is the primary cause. How to optimally troubleshoot this?

The crash reporter is useful for crashes, but not for UI freezes. How does one trace the origins of temporary (say, 5-10 sec) or permanent UI freezes (where a reboot is necessary)? How to find out whether this is simply a result of memory shortage, that would/should not happen without apps from extras-testing? UI freezes are also hard to bug report, like this one. And what to do when cpu usage generally is high without any obvious reason, or when the OS gets sluggish?

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

The whole concept of "out of memory" seems odd as I have never seen a Linux machine EVER do that. That includes desktop machines with half the RAM and SWAP that the N900 has and running in a higher resolution AND running KDE!

Perhaps this is related to root filling up as that is the only thing I have seen take a Linux box down, other than when the nVidia drivers were flaky.

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

Well, just keep top running in the x-terminal will tell you many things
about memory consumed etc. Basically, upon enabling extras-testing there is kind of checklist that is preferably being used after installing new app, including performance and memory hog monitoring.

Esp when UI is stuck, it is useful to ssh to the device and have a poke what's up in there, is there mem shortage, or just CPU is 100% somewhere in a deadlock.

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

So is this really because of extras-testing? Or do some of the regular apps cause problems like this too? :O

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

I'm also one of the lucky ones with N900 and haven't seen any "Out of memory" messages. I have also installed many programs from extras testing so it should not come from default applications.

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

Cool. Have you gotten the N900 to run out of memory by just opening a _lot_ of applications? I'd love to know how many browsers you can open side by side without slowing down the system before everything bogs down or the phone just crashes...

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

The 'Out of Memory' message is due to the rootfs filling up. This can happen if you are installing applications from extras-testing that take large amounts of space and aren't optified.

the root partition can also fill up if a bunch of apps are quickly installed and uninstalled. there is a BZ tracking that issue already. Rebooting seems to be the workaround at the moment.

I have experienced OS sluggishness a couple of times in the past 4 weeks. I think this happens because of apps leaking memory and if I haven't rebooted in a while.
I wonder why apps like modest, camera-ui, browserd each use about 20mb of memory even when they are not open.

Anywya, Xorg runs with a log file in /tmp/Xorg.0.log. It may provide helpful information when reporting bugs related to UI slowdown.

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

At one time, I had a lot of apps open without experiencing any significant issues (http://pi.pe/uges3q). The number-of-browsers count would depend on the resource taken by the webpages javascript/flash etc. facebook and gmail work fine together.

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

How about Maemo Talk + Facebook + Gmail + Wave + a few more forums + music player (playing in the background) + a Youtube video or two?

Pretty much day-to-day usage... are there any problems with that? :)

Re: "Out of memory" and UI freezes on N900
 

this seems indeed to apply in my case. especially the 'quickly installed and uninstalled' thing - i've tried a lot of programs for a short time, even some from extras-devel, but was under the impression that a simple uninstall would undo any harm.