Łukasz Andrzejak wrote:
Hi,
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.
--
Pozdrawiam
Łukasz Andrzejak
Thanks Lukasz - the reference to htop and xrestop was useful. I've
installed them and will monitor them over time to discern a pattern.
I must put my hand up: I am running the vanilla Gnome DE and there are
probably loads of services that I don't need and several I don't want.
Ordinarily I would run XFce but wanted to play in Candy Land for a
while with an all singing, all dancing, bells and whistles, bloated DE.
Also, I got lazy and fed up with configuring the XFce menus on Etch in
the way I used to use them on Slackware. Methinks I will need to beef
up on Gnome and the services it runs by default, what they do, and how
to turn them off or configure them. If anyone has any specific
recommendations that would be useful, but in the meantime I'll rummage
in the on-line Gnome help/info files.
As an aside, having just double checked, I am supposed to be running
1GB of RAM but it is only showing a total of 758MB. Is this typical
rounding off and 1GB is in reality only 758MB, or is it typical for the
full amount not to be shown? Seems like missing 250MB of RAM is a fair
chunk to not show up. What gives?
a fair chunk ? Thats exactly the amount i have. Total :D
Im running a amd XP2000 with 256 megs of ram with etch, along with a
2.6.19.1
kernel (i like to tinker) and im getting no slowdowns.
On the other hand - i often see swap, but thats what happens when you do code that processess hundred-meg databases with php. I have a healthy 4 gigs of it reserved (heck - with a 250gig drive, why not ?).
About the missing 250megs of ram...
Maybe you have an integrated card ?
Maybe you have ramdisks created on boot ? (its a debian kernel thing i think - ive seen this before - compile your own kernel and it will go away, or maybe add some boot params for the kernel).
The amount of physicall ram is inside proc/meminfo iirc, maybe youl get a 'true' read from there (and maybe thats where 'free' gets its info from and its biased too, dunno).
Maybe check syslog/kern.log/dmesg ?