Comment 107 for bug 159356

I am running on a ~9 year laptop with 1866MiB ram and 3933MiB swap.
Lubuntu installed. Linux ub2 4.18.0-16-generic #17-Ubuntu SMP Fri Feb 8 00:06:57 UTC 2019 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux
So my problem is for example, having two different browsers open with too many open browser tabs (4-6) on each caused a high memory load with system freeze. I noticed that swap was not being used in a why that I think it should be, that is a general slow down as more and more swap was used. Instead I got instant freeze for 30 minutes or more. So I found a program called munch.c and played around with it. I also created different versions of munch.c so memory usage was different. I was able to change system vm settings (in /proc/sys/vm) so the freeze stopped and swap started to be used correctly so that real memory and virtual memory became balanced. I define "balanced" to mean as more swap is used the system gradually becomes slower without freezing. In fact in the beginning the Linux-memory-swap system was very poor (default settings) and a Microsoft Windows 7 machine with same memory far far better at memory-swap management. My conclusion (for now) is that by altering default settings the Linux system became much better because the freeze bug was eliminated. I turned on the SysRq feature to enable the (f) option.
I found I could make the SysRq (f) work straight away. Also found the automatic OOM now kicked in as well, if I waited a bit.
I will add more details to this at a later time.