1. Check your thermals on your CPU and GPU, make sure they aren’t running too hot.
2. Turn off your computer and unplug it from the wall. Then check all your physical connections from the power supply to the motherboard and your graphics card. Everything should be fully seated in the sockets and firmly locked in. Loose connectors can cause power delivery issues that freeze or crash a system. In rare cases they can short out, causing severe damage to the components, or even a fire. So it’s important to do anyways.
3. Check your motherboard manufacture’s website and make sure you’re using the latest BIOS version. Your BIOS screen will tell you what your exact model number is and the current BIOS version.
4. Check to make sure you’re not running out of system RAM.
5. Use Furmark to stress test your GPU. If it runs in stress test mode for at least 4 hours straight without any crashes, that’s a good sign that your GPU isn’t the issue.
6. Use a CPU stress test program to do the same to your CPU. I actually like to go to Lichess.org, open their analysis board tool Lichess Analysis Tool, go into the settings and max out the move search depth, memory limit, and maximum lines calculated. Then I just make 15-20 random moves. The chess engine will sit there and calculate as long as you have that tab open on your local machine, and it will max out every core on your CPU 100% but there are dozens of other ways to stress your CPU, so feel free to search for them.
7. You may have a lemon of a CPU or GPU chip. All chips are “binned” meaning they are tested at the factory and depending on how they perform, they are accepted or rejected within certain boundaries, but there is a range. Some chips just barely pass the minimum standards brand new. Since all electronics degrade over time, especially modern chips with billions of microscopic transistors, if your chip already was barely good enough to pass the minimum specs when it was fresh out of the box, it can start to become unstable even under normal workloads, let alone more heavy use like what you’re describing. Undervolting and underclocking can help fix this. Using your motherboard’s settings or 3rd party tools (like LACT for GPUs), you can limit the maximum voltage and/or maximum frequency of your chips. This not only will reduce the thermal output of your chips, making them run cooler and slowing the degradation process, but often will make them run much more stable.

You could enable zram to compress data inside ram.

Totally off topic, and not trying to be a dick, but this helped me remember a lot vs alot

Traditionally, “freezing” means that the system doesn’t respond at all. More than likely, your system is just swapping heavily and slowing down to a crawl. If that’s what’s happening, the hard drive activity light will be on constantly.

The best fix for this is more memory, but RAM is currently expensive. If you can’t afford to buy more, you may have to try to cope in software. First, do The Bleeding Obvious: close any programs that you don’t immediately need before you start that Discord call. This includes not leaving unnecessary webpages open, just in case.

See what your distro has to say about swappiness and how to set it. You probably want a value lower than the default 60, maybe even as low as 0.

If it gets worse over tme, it’s possible that something you’re running has a memory leak. You may be able to figure out what using top or similar and seeing which programs’ memory use grows over time. Restarting the greedy ones periodically may be able to keep your system from bogging down, at the cost of some inconvenience.

Moving to a bare compositor rather than the relatively heavyweight KDE might also free up some RAM, but I’m not sure how much that will actually help.

sounds like memory exhaustion

Blow the dust out of the case. Redo the heat sink grease. Same for the GPU. Still does it, try a different power supply. Also check the RAM with a bootable mem86+ tool.

The next time it happens, reboot and then run sudo journalctl -b 1 -e -x. What errors are logged?

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Here’s the basic tests to run, one of them will show you what the problem is

• https://memtest.org/
• sysbench memory
• sysbench cpu
• stress-ng
• gpu-burn

This article will give you the details on how to use most of them: https://www.fosslinux.com/42630/best-cpu-stress-test-performance-benchmark-linux-tools.html

Be to do them in that order, you don’t want memory issues to show up looking like cpu issues, or cpu issues to look like gpu issues.

Could be oom? How much ram do you have and is it filling up?

Just about every freeze I’ve had on Linux in more than a decade has been a GPU driver problem, even when it seems to be processor related.

On top of the other suggestions here, upgrade your bios. We really need to know exactly what you mean by freezing though.

First try to reliable reproduce it if possible, perhaps with a stress test app. Or start with memtest.

Update your microcode for your CPU, and then cold boot.

That could be a failing power supply. Excessive ripple under heavy load can cause a hard lock up.