UserAgent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64) AppleWebKit/537.36 (KHTML, like Gecko) Ubuntu Chromium/64.0.3282.140 Chrome/64.0.3282.140 Safari/537.36

Steps to reproduce the problem:
1. Using Chromium on a system with little RAM (3GB in my case)
2. Browsing demanding sites, e.g. Facebook, much JS

What is the expected behavior?
System load remains constant.

What went wrong?
Load goes up to 40, once to 144.  The system becomes highly unresponsive.  Typically, it takes 10 minutes to up to an hour for me to kill Chromium eventually.

Did this work before? Yes Default Chromium of Ubuntu 17.04.

Chrome version: 64.0.3282.140  Channel: n/a
OS Version: Ubuntu 17.10
Flash Version: 

kswapd0 is intensively working when the load is so high.  There are 400 tasks in "top".

I've tried many things to limit Chromium but nothing helped.  I switched off swap entirely, *additionally* set vm.swappiness to 0.  I boxed Chromium in a cgroup with CPU and memory constraints, so that it could only use the physically available memory.  This didn't even improve the situation.

It does only happen on my 8-years-old desktop.  My modern laptop is unaffected.  I'm aware that probably none of you will be able to reproduce it.  I'm happy to listen to any advice on how to debug it further locally.