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I have a newly installed Manjaro system and it works fine most of the time but it has frozen a couple of times randomly.

What logs should look in (and what should I look for) to try to diagose the problem? I know its quite a broad question, but there must be somewhere that would be a good starting point.

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2 Answers 2

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The two most common causes of crashes are video driver bugs and bad RAM.

You can look for clues in logs in /var/log. Video problems are logged in /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Problems detected by the kernel are logged in /var/log/kern.log or /var/log/messages or some other file depending on the distribution, I don't know which file Manjaro uses.

However, if your system crashes, it often doesn't get a chance to write to the logs.

Do run a memory test. Install Memtest86+ (Arch Linux has it as a package, so you should have it on Manjaro as well). Reboot and select “memory test” at the Grub prompt and let it run for at least one full pass.

If you suspect a video driver problem, try using the free driver if you were using the proprietary driver, or vice versa.

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  • A major cause of unresponsive behaviour is running out of ram. Sometimes systems recover, after a few hours. It used to be that OOM would come in and kill the processes that consumed too much ram. These days for whatever reason that doesn't seem to happen anymore, the system is in such a bad state that OOM is too late to do anything and merely just ends up adding to the problem. Commented Jan 9, 2022 at 2:34
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It took me several months to solve why my older and slower Celeron computer would sometimes randomly freeze for several minutes while the hard drive light remained on.

It is not obvious that it is swapping. To prevent the system from freezing for long extended periods while the hard drive swaps large file chunks, manage the swap setting.

To see what the swappiness is set to

 cat /proc/sys/vm/swappiness

if it is set to the default value of 60 then

 sudo gedit /etc/sysctl.conf

add this to end of file

 vm.swappiness=10

My system no-longer freezes

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  • For the problem turned out to be that my swap was too small. Commented Aug 6, 2021 at 17:24
  • My AMD Ryzen 5 swaps in 2-3 secs. But the much slower Celeron would sometimes take minutes! (And it locked up while swapping) So, if you have a fast CPU the swap really is not an issue, but in my case it was :( It would seem that with the huge amounts of memory now common swapping should only be needed for powering down. Commented Aug 6, 2021 at 17:29
  • The user in the question asks about tips for debugging random freezes. You don't seem to address this. Commented Aug 7, 2021 at 5:52
  • @Kusalananda - I don't know what you base your comment on, but you are mistaken. Commented Aug 7, 2021 at 7:33
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    @Kusalananda OP is trying to diagnose the problem in order to resolve it. In the case of exhausting ram when OOM doesn't act in time, there wont be anything logged, the system will just grind to a halt and become too unresponse to switch terminals or drag a mouse across the screen or minimise a window. Load averages may be in the hundreds, perhaps thousands. This doesn't deserve to be downvoted. Commented Jan 9, 2022 at 2:37

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