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Re: Etch becoming slower than Sarge?



andy wrote:
Łukasz Andrzejak wrote:
Hi,

On 1/4/07, *Kumar Appaiah* <akumar@ee.iitm.ac.in <mailto: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?



Your kernel config is off: for 1GB:

...
CONFIG_NOHIGHMEM=y
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM4G is not set
# CONFIG_HIGHMEM64G is not set
# CONFIG_VMSPLIT_3G is not set
CONFIG_VMSPLIT_3G_OPT=y
# CONFIG_VMSPLIT_2G is not set
# CONFIG_VMSPLIT_1G is not set
...


Hugo








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