Comment 5 for bug 1683091

I also had a similar, but maybe not identical issue today.

First, several application windows grayed out, one after another. Then my system slowed down and after a few seconds became completely unresponsive. Of course, I couldn't switch to VT1 too. I waited for more than 10 minutes, but nothing changed, so I restarted the laptop.

What is unusual about the situation is that during the freeze there was no HDD activity (the blinkenlight didn't blink even once and I didn't hear my HDD) and the CPU apparently did almost nothing too (my laptop's fan was completely silent).

Unfortunately, there was nothing interesting in syslog when I checked it after the restart, and checking out dmesg after a restart wouldn't help much too.

I never experienced anything like this when I was on xenial. On xenial, usually, when I was running out of memory and swap, my system would become very, but not completely unresponsive, the fan would spin like crazy, the blinkenlight responsible for HDD activity would blink like crazy, and of course I would be able to hear the HDD too. I would usually switch to VT1, patiently wait until the switch actually happened, then type a command to kill the offending process. The 2 incidents that happened to me today (after I had upgraded to zesty) were nothing like this.