System and Network configuration • Pinpoint what is causing frequent crashes: CPU vs Memory

Lately, my laptop regularly crashes whenever I have ~10 tabs open in my browser or if I have 2-3 apps that do heavy lifting. This rarely happened before (like once every two months?) but now occurs 2-3x a day.

I have made two different adjustments to my laptop recently and can't determine which to revert and what it would look like if they were the culprit:

• I tackled a few lynis suggestions to harden my laptop a bit more (installed the following packages: evtest libpam-pwquality libpam-tmpdir needrestart ufw). There's an attached screenshot below of the suggestions that I followed.
  I installed antivirus protection (installed the following packages: clamav clamav-daemon)

I think that the antivirus might be the culprit because it takes up a sizeable amount of memory, and I've noticed that when an app crashes, clamd appears to disappear from the list of processes. Also, I read that the antivirus often leads to memory issues generally. I reduced memory usage for clamav by setting ConcurrentDatabaseReload false in /etc/clamav/clam.conf as well but it's still crashing

With that said, attached is an example of the system resources before/after of launching an app that crashes the system, and my (un)educated guess is that the CPU straining is what is leading to the crashes.

Questions

• Can someone explain whether memory or CPU is liable to be the culprit? From there, I can try to reverse engineer the changes I've made to revert the laptop to it's prior state.
  If it is a memory issue, do I need clamAV or an antivirus in 2024?

Statistics: Posted by m4c-attack — 2024-07-11 21:26 — Replies 3 — Views 62

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