On Thu, Jan 04, 2007 at 07:21:10PM +0000, andy wrote:
Marko Randjelovic wrote:
I think it is memory issue. Programs generally are using more memory
with new releases. Use 'free' command to see your memory situation.
'top' can tell you which processes are consuming most memory. You can
use also System Monitor with gnome or KDE System Guard but they use
more guess what: memory. :)
I am on a P4 machine with 1Gb of RAM and what surprises me, running Etch
with a 2.6.18 kernel is that even with this setup, there are times when
approx 10% of my swap space is being used. Memory seems to be cached
readily, but released grudgingly, altho' to be fair, I am using a Gnome
DE. This really only becomes a problem when playing a game like Oolite
(basically because the game becomes so slow to respond on full screen)
or when I am burning a recently converted video file to a DVD using
growisofs (then the entire system freezes and I have to pull the mains
on it and reboot).
I don't know if this is just my machine or a more general problem in
Etch having only been using Etch for a few weeks now.
I'm seeing some similar stuff in my one etch desktop -- always some of
the swap is being used. My specs are way lower than your's but I'm
using xfce. I don't see this behavior on my sid desktop, though it has
more memory and has a more stripped desktop which could be hiding
it.
I've got a P4 with 256 megs and 256 megs of swap. I'm currently
showing
andrew@debian:~$ free
total used free shared buffers
cached
Mem: 248152 229800 18352 0 2324
83880
-/+ buffers/cache: 143596 104556
Swap: 248996 91304 157692
with nothing on my desktop but two terminals -- 1 with mutt and one
with just the free command.
I've got a couple things running -- mysqld and gdm -- that would add a
bit, but still it seems like a lot more swapping is going on than I'd
like.
maybe I need to play with /proc/sys/vm/swappiness
A