Vyacheslav Rusakov's Blog

Fix IDEA crashes in Ubuntu (22.x)

Vyacheslav Rusakov's photo
Vyacheslav Rusakov
·

2 min read

For at least a year I observe sudden crashes of IntelliJ Idea (with SEGFAULT). After the latest ubuntu update, it appear way too often: sometimes even can't open IDE at all becuase it crash during "indexing" phase.

Did not help

I tried the most common advises:

  • Remove caches by removing ~/.cache/JetBrains/IntelliJIdea2022.3/ folder

  • Disable embedded chrome (for markdown rendering): ide.browser.jcef.enabled=false in idea.properties (Help/Edit custom properties)
    After all I enabled it back.

But it didn't help. Moreover, other apps like chrome and docker start failing too.

Solution

It appears that the problem was in swap file size (even having 64gb of memory, swap is still used). By default, swap file is 2g in ununtu.

To enlarge it into 4gb:

swapoff -a
fallocate -l 4G /swapfile
chmod 600 /swapfile
mkswap /swapfile
swapon /swapfile

Another advice was to encrease swappiness to avoid going anything into swap:

echo vm.swappiness=100 | sudo tee -a /etc/sysctl.conf && sudo sysctl -p

And, the last thing is the new systemd-oomd ubuntu service watching applications for memory and swap consuption and killing them to prevent kernel out of memory.

You can see its log with: journalctl -u systemd-oomd

As I understand, it works sometimes not as well as it was planned, and so, having enough memory, it makes sense to switch it off to avoid redundant checks:

systemctl is-enabled systemd-oomd
systemctl mask systemd-oomd

(masking to prevent other services to start it)

I suspect the last step wasn't required, but still did it. Overall, I observe much better system performance. IDEA craches are all gone!