On Fri, Jan 26, 2007 at 05:26:41PM +0000, Tyler wrote: > > I'm working with some fairly large image files on my Thinkpad R60 with > 512MB ram, running etch and fluxbox. On occassion the whole system > freezes for a minute or more after I zoom in or out. When this happens I > can usually get the mouse pointer to move, but often nothing else > responds - ie. clicking on anything, fluxbox shortcuts to jump to > another desktop, even c-a-F1 to get to a new terminal. that sucks > > When the machine starts responding again I open top and find that xorg > and gv (which I'm viewing the image in) use near 100% of my CPU when I > resize the image, and xorg is using 70% of my memory. I imagine during > freezes more of the memory is being used (all?). is the disk activity during this operation? if so you're probably doing some massive swapping, in which case, yes memory will help. I've seen some nasty behavior in xorg similar to this, but it was several upgrades ago (sid). Try a different viewer to see if that has an effect. > > My question is, will adding memory improve the situation? I'd been > considering adding another 512 or even a gig, as the 512 I have now is > the minimum recommended for use with the GRASS gis software that I'm > also starting to use, and the manuals recommend more. > memory is cheap nad the returns in performance can be huge. But only if you in a swapping situation. IOW, if your machine is not swapping, then more memory won't help. I'd bet, though that this is your issue. One thing that might help though, as a temporary fix, if you have two disk drives (I know, its a laptop, you probably don't) is set up two swap partitions, or even a swap file on a different disk than your primary swap. Make sure the priorities of the swaps are the same and you'll effectively double your swap performance (as I understand it) because the kernel will stripe across the swap areas. A
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