On 1/4/07, Kumar Appaiah <akumar@ee.iitm.ac.in> wrote:
A couple of my friends who were using Sarge, on machines with 128 MB
of RAM and 256 MB of RAM have complained that an upgrade from Sarge to
Etch has slowed their machine down considerably. This is irrespective
of the Window Manager. Is there any particular reason why this could
I havent noticed any 'slow down' myself.
Sadly, you failed to say what window manager/de you are using on this box.
If its a DE, you could try something lighter, or as others have pointed out - try to find the app thats hogging the memory.
Also - please note that slowing a machine down can mean lots of things, from not enough ram, to more read/writes to disk and not enough cpu power.
Most of these things can be checked with the tools mentioned in this thread, but im not exactly sure how to pinpoint a read/write culprit.
To add something actually usefull - i reccomend htop (a better top) and xrestop (checks running apps for memory footprint x-resource wise) to check what takes the most resources.
Both are somewhere in the repo's (htops is a standalone package, not sure about xrestop - its been ages since i installed it).
If your using a DE - maybe try using a simple windowmanager, and just compare.
Ive found that most people acutally dont use half the features of KDE/GNOME and something along the lines of fluxbox or fvwm is sufficient.
As a sidenote and personall preference - i always compile my own kernel with make-kpkg and im rarely troubled by the kernel problems that my friends mention.
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