Try firing up btop in a terminal before you kick off an update in another, that should give you a better indication of what's happening when the system hangs. Turn on kernel "show kernel threads" so you can spot anything kernel side eating CPU.
Check your kernel journal from the last boot after a freeze, there should be some indication of what went wrong before you rebooted the machine. journalctl -k -b -1 will show you what was going on with the kernel before the machine froze.
Edit: things to watch for in btop: CPU pegged at 100% and no disk activity? Look at the top process, there's your offender. Super high IO latency but otherwise the system looks normal? Try another drive. Memory completely used and swap endlessly thrashing? Find something to kill to make more memory available.
Turn on "show kernel threads" in btop, they're off by default, so you can see if something in the kernel is eating CPU time.
Even then the recent LRU swap changes have largely eliminated pathological swap behavior cascading into an unusable system state. Those changes went in like 2y ago and should have been picked up by most distros by now.
I mean, if we're just talking high bitrate digital audio then yeah, convenience and sound wise digital beats the pants off of analog any day. CDs in particular though? Nah. Gimme that solid state no moving parts convenience I get from packing 50GB of flac, aac or vorbis rips onto my phone and a Chromecast audio to plug into my sound system.
The day when "weird and rapey" is popularly used to explain Republican politics is the day the left finally gets their collective heads out of their asses and starts calling a spade a spade.
Google trends, see my reply to the other comment. Epidemiology Twitter has a bunch of related chatter on the topic too.
If you want to dive into a data topic like this my first stop is Twitter to see what the experts are saying, then Google trends to see how that translates into searches the mass public are making while dealing with it.
Google trends. Ask it questions like "why is my cat bleeding" or "why is my dog bleeding" and look at trends and localization over the last 3mo. Search in both English and Spanish to capture data from native Spanish speakers (the bulk of the workforce at meat processing plants) and their extended communities.
Google h5n1 symptoms in cats and dogs (bleeding from the eyes, ass, high fever, pink eye, seizures, etc) and come up with queries that everyday people might Google (like: "why is my dog bleeding from his privates" because Americans can't say "anus") and go from there.
I haven't really kept track of all of the queries we looked through over the last couple of months, this was more my SO's thing. Epidemiologist Twitter probably has some good data too.
Off the top of my head pink eye in dogs, cats with seizures, cats bleeding from their eyes, dogs bleeding from the ass, high fevers, etc all had pretty narrow localization around major industrialized meat packing plants or industrial scale livestock farming.
Yeah, that's my understanding of that sysctl too. If IOPS are cheap (and they are when dealing with ram or high IOPS NVMe) there's no real point in performing extra read ahead.
I don't have my potato lab up and running at the moment but my android devices and sff hypervisors are all using page-cluster=0. That's the default setting on android and ChromeOS I think, I probably tuned it on the proxmox machines years ago and forgot about it.
Edit: that's basically swap read ahead right? Ie: number of pages to read from swap at a time.
Gee, maybe this is why "why is my dog/cat bleeding from the eyes" and similar Google searches have been trending around industrial scale meat processing hotspots for months.
Almost all of our primary economic indicators have been juiced to hell and back so that "the economy" looks great on paper. In reality wages suck, inflation sucks, health care, energy and rent costs suck and the bottom 90% are growing ever poorer. But hey, our economic indicators look great so open some more champagne!
I wrote this years ago when I was doing a bunch of work with low ram (1gb) potato SBCs and I use it everywhere, including my 32/64gb SFF proxmox nodes: https://github.com/foundObjects/zram-swap
You might find the comments re: swap sizing and compression ratios handy, I've found that lz4 approximates to a 2.5:1 compression ratio during most workloads. On your 4gb potato I'd run something like ~2GB lz4 zram, which would work out to a ~5GB zram device. I never bothered with sysctl tuning, you generally don't need to.
Edit: just about every Chromebook under the sun, and like 90%+ of all Android devices, runs lzo/lzo-rle zram swap at ~(½ramsize3). Change that to 2.5 for lz4 and you're set.
Don't forget that he sent state police to raid one of his public health officials home in the middle of the night because she dared to talk about his stats mishandling publicly.
If you haven't intentionally setup zram swap you're almost certainly not using it.