Elementary OS is freezing after some time of use

Question

Sometimes, after a few hours of use, elementary freezes and I have to shut it down by hold the power button. This is happening to me since I upgraded from Freya (didn't happen) to Loki.

My laptop is Asus-X550

• Intel i5-3337U
• Nvidia Geforce 720m
• 8 GB of RAM

Normally, when it freezes I have Chrome a bunch of tabs opened in Chrome and Intellij IDEA opened, a few hours have passed and I try to open other program, heavy or not. Maybe I need more RAM? But I think that 8 GB is enough to handle that...

I have also Windows 10 installed and no problems on it, so we can discard a hardware problem

Any suggestions?

---

UPDATE:

Okay, so I reinstalled Loki and happened again:

https://pastebin.com/5eYH0Yky

The /var/log/syslog file after the system logged out itself (after waiting 3 or 4 minutes waiting without control of the mouse nor keyboard and without effect pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1) and logged in again.

Before starting to freeze, I launched Eclipse and only one tab in Chrome was opened at the same time.

Also, I had the top command running and there was nothing strange at the beginning of freezing, java (Eclipse) was taking about 0,7 % of RAM and was the most RAM consuming process. But after waiting those 3 minutes the XOrg service began to take more and more RAM, taking all of it until it logged out (Which is an outrage thing, given that I have 8 GB of RAM and was being used just before freezing about 2% of it)

Anyone know what is happening and how could I fix it?

Answer 1

Hello and welcome to the large family of Optimus-enabled-elementary-powered-laptop users, I too own a slightly similar model (Asus K53SD, i3-2350M, nVidia GeForce 610M, 6GB RAM) and had it happily spew Xorg errors and kernel panics for a long time. The laptop ran very hot all the time, even idle, and the battery drained at an alarming rate. The general idea was that both graphic cards were active, and they were both trying to access the same resources.

The solution was to upgrade the kernel and install the appropriate nVidia driver from the Ubuntu drivers PPA. BUT the thing is, not any combination will work, for me it was a trial-and-error process: upgrade to a certain kernel, install an nVidia driver from the ppa, check functionality, fail, purge driver, install next one, and so on. It took a while, but got lucky and managed to find a very stable combination:

• Kernel 4.8.0-040800rc6-generic
• nvidia-370

I know the kernel is a Release Candidate, but it's the only one that worked for me, the machine behaves exemplary, and frankly I've been quite reluctant to try another upgrade, for it might break everything. So these are my steps, proceed with care:

1. Kernel upgrade:

   mkdir upgrade

   cd upgrade

   wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8-rc6/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800rc6_4.8.0-040800rc6.201609121119_all.deb

   wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8-rc6/linux-headers-4.8.0-040800rc6-generic_4.8.0-040800rc6.201609121119_amd64.deb

   wget http://kernel.ubuntu.com/~kernel-ppa/mainline/v4.8-rc6/linux-image-4.8.0-040800rc6-generic_4.8.0-040800rc6.201609121119_amd64.deb

   sudo dpkg -i *.deb

   sudo reboot

2. Add Ubuntu drivers repository:

   sudo add-apt-repository ppa:graphics-drivers/ppa

   sudo apt update

3. Install nVidia driver:

   sudo apt install nvidia-370 nvidia-settings nvidia-prime

   sudo reboot

   At this point, there's a 50% chance you might end up with a black screen. If this is the case, open a tty console (Ctrl + Alt + F1 in the black screen), login with your user and password, and:

   sudo apt purge nvidia*

   sudo reboot

Now you should have a functional nVidia driver. From the Applications menu run NVIDIA X Server Settings, select PRIME Profiles and make sure Intel (Power Saving Mode) is selected. If not, select it and relog.
If the black screen after reboot happens, you just have to try a newer driver from the ppa (replace nvidia-370 in the command above with something else: nvidia-375, nvidia-378). Ultimately, you might have to try a different kernel.
PRIME Profiles will allow you to manually switch between graphics cards, as needed. Using Intel will increase battery duration and keep your laptop cool, using nVidia will make games run better.