Constant Program Crashes, Troubleshooting Help Appreciated

General system Newbie
1

Hey y’all, I recently made the switch to Linux and EndeavorOS a couple months ago and since then I’ve been having constant issues with programs crashing, namely Firefox (tabs or the whole browser), Discord (freezes), Steam (crashes and restarts), Arc Raiders (crashes or corrupts one of the files and has to be re-installed, and War Thunder (freezes).

Firefox is the biggest offender by far with it sometimes being stable but often with tabs crashing immediately and repeatedly when attempting to open many websites. Discord is probably the most problematic, with the program randomly freezing and a system reboot being required to get it to relaunch maybe half the time, even after opening the task manager and killing the program off entirely.

I’ve been experiencing these issues since I installed Linux, but I do believe they got noticeably worse with Nvidia’s 580.105.08 drivers. I did try reverting those for another reason (secondary monitor has been stuck at the wrong resolution and aspect ratio for a month now without Nvidia fixing it yet), but I ran into issues with that and had to re-update everything. That said, these issues did exist before 580.105.08. I also can’t switch to the open drivers because my GTX 1080 isn’t supported.

  • I checked the health of my boot drive and the NVME SSD I have Steam/games installed on via smartctl and it said they’re healthy.
  • I tried switched between wayland and xorg, but it crashes if I try logging in with xorg.
  • As far as I know everything is up to date (although if there’s some driver causing issues which isn’t being updated via yay then I don’t know how to check or fix that.

I’m very new to Linux and could use any and all help troubleshooting this.

I figure it may be the first thing asked for, so including my inxi -F output below.

System:
Host: Makhnovshchina Kernel: 6.17.9-arch1-1 arch: x86_64 bits: 64
Desktop: Xfce v: 4.20.1 Distro: EndeavourOS
Machine:
Type: Desktop Mobo: Micro-Star model: Z370-A PRO (MS-7B48) v: 1.0
serial: Firmware: UEFI vendor: American Megatrends
v: 2.30 date: 12/21/2017
CPU:
Info: 6-core model: Intel Core i7-8700K bits: 64 type: MT MCP cache:
L2: 1.5 MiB
Speed (MHz): avg: 4503 min/max: 800/4700 cores: 1: 4503 2: 4503 3: 4503
4: 4503 5: 4503 6: 4503 7: 4503 8: 4503 9: 4503 10: 4503 11: 4503 12: 4503
Graphics:
Device-1: NVIDIA GP104 [GeForce GTX 1080] driver: nvidia v: 580.105.08
Display: x11 server: ``X.Org`` v: 21.1.21 with: Xwayland v: 24.1.9 driver: X:
loaded: nvidia gpu: nvidia,nvidia-nvswitch resolution: 1: 3440x1440~100Hz
2: 1920x1080~60Hz
API: EGL v: 1.5 drivers: nvidia,swrast
platforms: gbm,x11,surfaceless,device
API: OpenGL v: 4.6.0 compat-v: 4.5 vendor: nvidia mesa v: 580.105.08
renderer: NVIDIA GeForce GTX 1080/PCIe/SSE2
Info: Tools: api: eglinfo,glxinfo de: xfce4-display-settings
gpu: nvidia-settings,nvidia-smi x11: xdriinfo, xdpyinfo, xprop, xrandr
Audio:
Device-1: Intel 200 Series PCH HD Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-2: NVIDIA GP104 High Definition Audio driver: snd_hda_intel
Device-3: JMTek LLC. USB PnP Audio Device
driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
Device-4: SteelSeries ApS Arctis 5
driver: hid-generic,snd-usb-audio,usbhid type: USB
API: ALSA v: k6.17.9-arch1-1 status: kernel-api
Server-1: PipeWire v: 1.4.9 status: active
Network:
Device-1: Realtek RTL8111/8168/8211/8411 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet
driver: r8169
IF: enp3s0 state: up speed: 1000 Mbps duplex: full mac: 30:9c:23:9d:99:d8
Drives:
Local Storage: total: 3.75 TiB used: 721.78 GiB (18.8%)
ID-1: /dev/nvme0n1 vendor: Western Digital model: WD BLACK SN850X 2000GB
size: 1.82 TiB
ID-2: /dev/sda vendor: Western Digital model: WDS100T2B0A-00SM50
size: 931.51 GiB
ID-3: /dev/sdb vendor: Western Digital model: WD10EZEX-08WN4A0
size: 931.51 GiB
ID-4: /dev/sdc vendor: SanDisk model: SDSSDA120G size: 111.79 GiB
Partition:
ID-1: / size: 913.85 GiB used: 235.85 GiB (25.8%) fs: ext4 dev: /dev/sda2
Swap:
Alert: No swap data was found.
Sensors:
System Temperatures: cpu: 40.0 C mobo: N/A gpu: nvidia temp: 57 C
Fan Speeds (rpm): N/A gpu: nvidia fan: 0%
Info:
Memory: total: 64 GiB note: est. available: 62.75 GiB used: 5.54 GiB (8.8%)
Processes: 341 Uptime: 1h 27m Shell: Bash inxi: 3.3.40

2

Not sure this would be it, but your BIOS is pretty old. I would look into that.

3

I know that your system has a lot of memory, but as I understand it, it is generally recommended to have swap. You might try to add swap and see if that helps.

Understanding swap:

Topic on this forum about swap

More about zswap:

1 Like
4

I would start with memtest to test your memory, changes are that one is corrupt

If that passes without errors add swap is a must even with 64GB of ram

Updating bios is always a good starting point but test the ram first!! if that is showing errors changes are that a bios update will go bad

1 Like
5

I’ld check the journalctl for more specific clues on the crashes.

Just based on your description, I can’t really tell for sure if its an issue with the graphics hardware or different. But according to your inxi output you’re using the 580.105.08 driver and I don’t see any indication if it the proprietary or the open source driver version. For the GTX 1080 it is not recommended to use the open source driver but to use the proprietary driver instead.

6

Apologies for the late responses y’all, it’s been a busy week.

@fred666 I ran memtester86. Did get some errors in tests 3-6 (ended tests after 6 because I didn’t want to spend a day or two doing that), swapped positions of RAM and they went down significantly. I’ll troubleshoot further at a later date or if nothing else works because it could be corroded/dirty contacts or an issue with the Motherboard/CPU/PSU and not the RAM at all, but I doubt those errors are the primary issue unless my RAM decided to start failing precisely when I installed Linux or Linux is far worse at coping with faulty RAM than Windows.

@Greymane Yeaaaaah. Went ahead and updated that despite the memory issues because they weren’t egregious and frankly I haven’t found out enough to stop ducking around yet. It led to some accursed piece of Windows still lurking somewhere on my computer putting a Microsoft bootloader insider my Linux bootloader which prevented the BIOS from recognizing the Linux bootloader, and that took a few hours to fix, but I figured it out. Now on bios version E7B48IMS.2DO instead of 1.0. :sweat_smile:

@SemLraug @fred666 Isn’t a swap file or partition on an SSD a really good way to dramatically shorten that drive’s lifespan? And while I do have an HDD I could put it on, wouldn’t using a slower drive like that for RAM purposes impact performance noticeably?
If not I’m down to try it, but I’d probably need step by step instructions.

@1093i3511 I’ll keep an eye on it going forward.
As for my graphics drivers, as I said in my original post I’m on the standard branch as I cannot switch to the open drivers because my GTX 1080 isn’t supported.

7

There are situations where this seems true. But I’m not sure that this would be true in domestic use cases. All I can say, anecdotally, is that I always have swap active, even when running on an SSD.

My Homeserver running on an RPI4, with raspberry pi os, running 24x7 uses an old laptop SSD, and I’ve not seen any problems due to write or read failures.

My laptop uses swap on an SSD, but is only 3 years old. But no problems there either.

My 12 year (ish) old iMac had a scavenged SSD. I had swap active. The iMac did break, but that was due to RAM chip failure.

But as I say, this is just anecdotal. I may just have been lucky up until now. Perhaps others can chime in with more definite data points.