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I think I understand why Linux doesn't implement SIGINFO (Ctrl+T) - the system stops responding because you were extracting a 800MB xz compressed file on a machine with 8 cores and 16GB ram. (It's been 25 minutes now...)

What good is siginfo when you can neither switch windows, move the cursor nor press any keys?

Very pragmatic :catjam:

Do I wait longer? (I don't think the command should take this long?) Or do I reboot and risk corrupting the filesystem? What is the OS doing spinning the fan at full speed all this while? I can't even run top, I hit the shortcut to open new console tab 10 minutes ago...

Switching away from windowing to system console took a while, and over a minute to switch back. Not trying that again.

Much Windows 98 nostalgia happening X-)

@hiway IME this happens when you have too much swap. Something starts runaway allocation and swapping is excruciatingly slow because it happens on page granularity, synchronously. My view is that you should never have more swap than you'd be willing to wait for copying with dd, 4k block size, sync after each block.

Harshad Sharma

@dalias I haven't tweaked anything when installing this system, it is as the distribution creators have set it up :')

@hiway Yeah, nobody seems to be able to agree on good defaults...

But there's some runaway resource usage bug triggering your problem anyway. Swap behavior just allows it to get nasty bogged down rather than failing early.

@dalias I'll read up on how to shrink the swap. The RAM usage rarely goes above 6GB in my daily use (have 16), so swap/thrashing never crossed my mind. Thank you :)

@dalias the system had 2GB swap, temporarily turned it off completely. I'm curious if that was also causing the intermittent lockups (and not just this one long freeze) when the laptop had uptime greater than a handful days.