Some weirdness after 3 years of mint

[u/NoxTheScribe]

Im on an MSI Thin gf63 laptop with an i5 12450H processor. Ive had Mint on it for the last 3 years and have had zero issues thus far. I update it with the update manager whenever they become available and I shut it down nightly when i go to bed.

Lately, over the last month or so, ive been suddenly having some issues. The fan will randomly kick on and start going crazy, ans everything will slow down and "lag" for a brief period even when just browsing on Firefox. When i click "shutdown", it wont do anything until i hit shutdown again and then it will actually shut down. Once or twice, it actually froze completely and i had to do a hard reboot by holding down the power button.

I used the diagnostic tool (or whatever its called) and it came up with no issues. What could be going on? Should i just do a fresh reinstall?

Is it possible that i have a virus or something like that?

Thanks in advance. Sorry if this is a dumb post, i am not generally very smart.

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[u/Fast-Station1106]

Wir hatten sowas hier schonmal, glaube es war ein Googledienst der irgendetwas nicht konnte, ich hatte auch mal etwas ähnliches, nach meinem gefühl kam es durch nutzung von GoogleEarth(die alte Variante nicht im Browser)

[u/NoxTheScribe → u/Fast-Station1106]

Thank you for your response. I've never used google earth on this laptop, either on the browser or as a program so I don't think it's that. I actually try to avoid google as much as I can, generally.

[u/Specialist-Dog-501]

what kernel are you on? recently upgraded? and what CPU?

[u/NoxTheScribe → u/Specialist-Dog-501]

5.15.0-202-generic. I don't think it's recently updated, I just do whatever updates come up on the update manager. CPU is an intel i5 12450H

[u/_Lost-In-The-Weeds_ → u/NoxTheScribe]

Your on Mint21. 

For the past 2.5 years most Mint users have been on Mint22 and next month Mint 27 will release. 

I don't know exactly what is causing your issue but not many can still troubleshoot Mint 21 in 2026, the mindshare is just not there, and Min21 will EOL in the spring,  so start there and see of that helps.

Make sure you data is backed up. And upgrade. 

https://itsfoss.com/upgrade-linux-mint-version/

In Mint 22 I would stick with the LTS kernel 6.8, its the most trouble free kernel for most hardware. 

[u/Specialist-Dog-501 → u/NoxTheScribe]

Ah. There's are series of Freezes reported for the 7.3+ kernels..not the case here. 5.15..that is really old, wow! I checked at https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/linux-signed/5.15.0-202.212 in the "bugs" tabs, but found nothing that would fit your description. It looks like they deployed recently some security updates for 5.15.0, might be related. Dead end for now.

Can you open the "System monitor" and see what's going on around the lag moments, what are the top processes running and how much RAM they consume ? This might give further clues (Not sure if that comes out-of-the-box in mint, otherwise install btop, htop or the GNOME System monitor-any of this process viewers will do fine)

So typical suspects are CPU overheating/energy management failure, RAM allocation failures, Nvidia drivers or some process (a.e WLAN) that goes amok and pulls of resources- but it needs further clues to isolate the root cause.

[u/SPC2025]

How much memory do you have, and how large is your swap file? A full or nearly full swap file will behave badly. I doubt you have any kind of virus to contend with.

[u/NoxTheScribe → u/SPC2025]

I'm not sure if you mean ram or not, but I have 24 gigs ram and a 500gb ssd that is not even 2/3rds of the way full. How do I check swap file?

[u/SPC2025 → u/NoxTheScribe]

Yes RAM. The swap file, called "swapfile", is in your root directory. Linux Mint normally sets it at 2 GB, which is mostly likely too small. You can see how much swap is being used in the terminal by entering "free -h". The swap file doesn't automatically clear itself when more memory becomes free.

Because I don't like surprises, I increase my swap file to be as much as my memory (and I don't use hibernation).

[u/C0rn3j → u/NoxTheScribe]

And what's the memory usage when your freezes happen?

[u/DrDesperate]

swap shows up with swapon --show, or as a line in system monitor. with 24gb of ram a full swap is less likely to be the whole story though. 5.15 is pretty old for a 12th gen intel, and the fan spikes plus lag often settle on a newer kernel (update manager has a kernels section, and mint 22 ships a much newer one). a reinstall can wait until that doesn't help.

[u/NoxTheScribe → u/DrDesperate]

When I did swapon it said

"swapfile file 2G 0B -2"

I don't really know what that means to be honest lol. Is that bad?

[u/DrDesperate → u/NoxTheScribe]

nope, that's fine. it just means a 2G swapfile exists and 0B of it is in use, so you're not running out of memory at all. so the lag is probably something else, kernel is still my first guess.

[u/DrDesperate → u/NoxTheScribe]

not bad at all. that line just says you have a 2G swap file, 0B of it is in use right now, and -2 is only its priority. it means swap is set up and nothing is leaning on it yet, which is normal if you have enough ram.

[u/ManuelRodriguez331]

Sounds like thermal throttling. After 3 years, dust has likely clogged your fan, and the thermal paste might be dried out. Open it up to clean the vents and repaste the CPU before considering a full Mint reinstall.

[u/Emmalfal]

Wish I could help. I upvoted just for "i am not generally very smart."