Neil Youngman wrote:
On Friday 07 Jan 2011 17:07:30 Bob Proulx wrote:Neil Youngman wrote:It can take several seconds to pop up a menu and, in the worst case, swapping from one window to another can take minutes, even if the other window is a simple xterm. I have also observed windows being redrawn so slowly that you can can see the rendering creeping slowly down the screen. I think that this all indicates that the graphics is the root of the problem.To me this suggests that you have a process that is consuming all of your memory. This is causing your system to swap.That's a reasonable theory. The main reason I don't think it's primarily a swapping issue, is that it seems sluggish even before I load up all the memory hogs. When I was running lenny, I did find that loading up big Java apps could bring the system grinding to a halt, but it was much more responsive before I loaded up the memory hogs.I will continue to observe the system, with swapping in mind as a possible factor and see if there is a correlation.
But if it was swapping you would see the HDD light being lit when you were not doing any obvious disk activity. If you have not seen that then it is not swapping.
I have CPU load monitors in both X and VT. Does your CPU load go up when you get these difficulties?
Hugo