Re: Debian Slow?
<edward@murrell.co.nz> writes:
>
> I'm guessing it has something to do with the memory usage, because
> the machines here use about 15 MB of swap, with 20ish MB of memory
> free by the time I'm halfway through my 1 GB swap at home! I've
> cleaned up the services, and turned off things like FTP, Samba, and
> so on, but it hasn't made much of a difference (according to top,
> they weren't using much ram anyway).
Gentoo optimizations can't account for a 10-15 performance factor in
software startup times. A difference like that is probably a result
of memory pressure, and the swap numbers above suggest that this is
indeed your problem.
If the machines at the lab have 256MB of memory and are using about
15MB of swap and your machine at home has 256MB of memory and is using
512MB of swap, then you're going to have to account for that 497MB.
What's using it?
After your machines has been running (slowly) for a while, do a "ps
avx". The "DRS" column will give you rough idea of how many kilobytes
of potentially swappable memory a process is using, and the "MAJFL"
column will tell you how many times that process has experienced a
major page fault (i.e., a request for memory that probably resulted in
disk access including swapping). What are the worst offenders in that
list?
--
Kevin <buhr@telus.net>
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