Poor performance with 1GB of RAM

["J. Zidar" <zee@email.si>]

Hello. I have a very peculiar problem with my Debian install.

It seems to me that Debian is not using my ram at all, because I can hear and 
see a lot of disk activity happening, which could only mean that the system 
is using the swap partition (size 2GB). 

The net result is that the system gets unresponsive with apps taking ages to 
load or not loading at all.

I'm running stable with 1 or 2 debs from unstable and custom build 2.4.20 
kernel with the High Memory Support and Highmem I/O support enabled.

I'm using XFree(4.2.10) and KDE3.1.2. The syslog doesn't have any record of 
any errors. The Xfree log warn about not being able to open /dev/apm_bios, 
which is strange beacuse I have ACPI enabled.

BTW: Is it normal that XFree86 uses 280 megs of ram?

Any advice on how to solve this situation are welcome, hopefully this doesn't 
include a complete reinstall of the system. :-))

Thanks,
Jernej Zidar