Bret Busby wrote: > The problem is that the computer runs out of RAM. > > The RAM usage increases, until it runs out of RAM, then, as at > present, the system becomes morbidly slow, and takes a few seconds > to respond to key presses or mouse moves, then, after a while, it > just crashes. What you are describing here is not a failure of Debian to swap properly (really the Linux kernel which is a component). But instead you are describing a process or set of processes that have a memory leak and that are consuming ram without bounds. That is NOT NORMAL. Find those processes and take corrective action. > After about 95% of the RAM is used, so that the computer becomes > frustratingly slow, it starts to use the swap space, up to about the > same amount as the RAM, which is about 1/6 of the swap space. Yes. That is the way that Unix-like systems work and have for the last forty years. And why we always try to avoid thrashing swap space. > Example: at present, the SystemMNonitor shows > Memory usage - 7.6GB (98.4%) of 7.7GB > Swap usage - 7.9GB (19.3%) of 40.9GB What is consuming 7.9G of swap? That is very large and very unusual. Find that and fix it. Do nothing else until you understand where the memory is going. > and my XT with 640KB RAM and a 10MB HDD, used to run faster than > this is running. Of course. Any system that is thrashing will be much slower than it should be running. You know the old joke about, doctor, it hurts when I do this, doctor says, don't do that? Same thing here. Don't do that. > >Second, you say you can't delete big files (>1 GiB of size) because your > >system becomes unmanageable and runs out of memory. This is of course not > >normal (even a system with as little as 256 MiB of RAM shouldn't > >experience this problem at all). > > No. > > I said that I can save and delete files up to about 1.2GB. > > I can not save files larger than about 1.2GB, to the system. > > The file manager crashes, and, crashes the system, when the saved > file size gets to 1.2GB, if it gets that big. I have had some > attempted file saves crash at 12MB, crashing the system. > > The file manager does not work well. I agree that this sounds like a separate problem. But I find it strange that both problems exist together on a system. So they are probably related somehow. But concentrate on one first and the solution to it may also solve the other. > >>I do hope that Debian 7 implements memory paging, or swapping. Debian practically means Linux. Linux *does* implement memory paging and swapping. I am sorry if your particular system is broken in some way. But I assure you that it is something that you have done to your system and that behavior is not normal. No one other than yourself is seeing the problem you are seeing. Therefore no one else can debug it for you. > >I'm not completely sure what you mean by this :-? > > It seems to have stopped working properly, in about Debian 5, and I > hope that Debian 7 gets it working again. I assure you that it is working on Debian 5, 6, and 7. > In Debian 5, I could sometimes kickstart memory swapping, by running > something like the GIMP, and opening images, then closing the > application, at which stage, memory swapping would sometimes start > (on a different computer - Debian 5 would not run on this computer), > but I have not yet managed to get memory swapping working properly > in the 64 bit Debian 6. I do not remember whether the memory > swapping works on the 32 bit installation of Debian 6, on my NX5000 > laptop. You are creating a superstition instead of working it through. That won't help. Instead find out what is using all of your virtual memory. The tool I like the best is 'htop'. Install it. It is nice and I think you will like it. # apt-get install htop Then run it: $ htop Then press F6 to change the sort function. Use the up and down cursor keys to select VIRT for sorting by size of virtual memory usage. What programs are the top virtual memory consumers on your system? (On mine it is usually firefox.) Based upon what those memory hogs are on your system we can advise what action might be taken. To the list... Does anyone have any nice 'ps' recipies for doing the same thing? Bob
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