I have a fairly beefy Arch Linux computer, kernel 3.7.7-1-ARCH. However, recently it's been having random freeze ups. Never common, but it'd freeze for a good 15 seconds where no program is responsive. Sometimes the mouse freezes with it and the cursor doesn't move. After this happens, it'll usually happen 2 or 3 more times until I decide to just restart my computer.
It just happened again a few minutes ago and this time I traced it using top. Whenever my computer would freeze, khugepaged CPU usage would randomly rise to 100%.
I run VMWare with 7 gigs of RAM assigned to it, however, my computer has 16G of RAM. When this last freeze up happened, I had 6G of RAM free. To give an idea, heres the header of top
KiB Mem: 16394208 total, 10194584 used, 6199624 free, 4 buffers
KiB Swap: 8388604 total, 103916 used, 8284688 free, 8788952 cached
I've seen some ways to disable khugepaged, but what bad effects could this cause? How can I just get it to behave better?
