System Crashing - not new but more information - just looking for ideas

[LuigiCalamar]

I've mentioned before that my system will crash from time to time. I have to unplug my PC to get it back. I've shared some logs and such in the past but I have some more information - just looking for thoughts/ideas if this is making any sense:

At the bottom of this post I'll include my PC specs.

So the main things I'm running on this machine are:

• Firefox (often multiple tabs)
• QBitorrent
• Plex Media Server
• Beeper (communication package)
• Windscribe (VPN)
• I also use Radaar and Sonaar to auto find shows (they don't seem to use much )

That's 95% of my processes.

Usually when it crashes I'm running all the above.

Lately as I've been watching this - it seems that FireFox is by far the largest resource user.... I do have a number of add-ons.
--- of these tabs - I use ProtonMail which seems to be especially resource consuming.

I do 90% of my PC activities in Firefox... so if I'm on my computer I'm likely in Firefox.

Now - as soon as I'm done using my PC I shutdown Firefox... shutdown Beeper (which is also a big user of resources). I typically leave Qbitorrent up - but will often just quit it also (I need to put it on a schedule to only run at night...)

Quitting Firefox (and other apps) seems to greatly reduce my system crashes.

Note: I've also increased my swap from 500gb to 4tb... didn't do much.

If it makes sense that Firefox etal are overloading my system - any ideas how to manage (other than quitting) - or how to better log what is crashing things... (logs haven't done much in the past but perhaps looking for specifics can help?)



Operating System: Kubuntu 26.04 LTS
KDE Plasma Version: 6.6.6
KDE Frameworks Version: 6.24.0
Qt Version: 6.10.2
Kernel Version: 7.0.0-31-generic (64-bit)
Graphics Platform: Wayland
Processors: 16 × 13th Gen Intel® Core™ i7-13620H
Memory: 32 GiB of RAM (31.1 GiB usable)
Graphics Processor: Intel® Graphics
Manufacturer: GMKtec
Product Name: NucBox K7 PLUS
System Version: V1.0

[die.boer]

Firefox may be contributing to the problem, but with 32 GB RAM I wouldn't assume that simply having a lot of Firefox tabs open should hard-lock the entire machine. The fact that you have to physically power-cycle it makes me more suspicious of a kernel/GPU/driver/hardware issue, with Firefox potentially acting as the trigger.

I'd first try Firefox with hardware acceleration disabled, then Firefox with extensions disabled, and separately test without Windscribe. If one of those makes the crashes disappear, we've got a much better direction to investigate.

I'd also check the previous boot's kernel log immediately after a crash:

journalctl -b -1 -k -p 0..4

and particularly look for i915, drm, gpu, oom, lockup, watchdog, MCE, or hardware error.
or post the output of command here

Increasing swap isn't likely to help if the actual problem is a GPU/driver/kernel lockup.

I've also increased my swap from 500gb to 4tb

is that a typo ? Please also post output of

swapon --show

free -h

[LuigiCalamar]

yes - a mistype... 4 gb