Hello Every One

[Fraser Campbell]

On November 9, 2003 12:53 am, Stephen Oulton wrote:

> When I first start the system and go to my user area it works fine and
> after a few minutes it starts to respond slowly.

Something is probably using up all your memory, type free and see what the 
output says:

             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:        256784     242004      14780          0      23896      57880
-/+ buffers/cache:     160228      96556
Swap:       497972      88032     409940

The important numbers are 256784, 160228 and 88032.  256784 is total available 
real memory.  160228 is the total real memory used by your system (excluding 
fs cache), 88032 is the amount of swap space used.

If the total real memory used (160228) approaches the total memory available 
(256784) then you're likely to have serious performance issues.  An easy way 
to see what's hogging your memory is top.  Go into top then press M to sort 
by memory usage.  The top memory hogs will be at the top of the list, I 
believe RSS is the number that's most important of the memory columns.

Once you've found a process that's sucking up memory then start debugging it.  
X, browsers and kde processes are often memory hogs but if they're causing 
trouble often the only recourse is to disable them.

We once saw a Mandrake computer that was using over 300MB of available memory 
(all memory in fact).  Turns out it's cups daemon had been configured to save 
every single print job ever printed.  Don't know if cups was loading them all 
into memory or what exactly it was doing but once we reconfigured it to not 
do that and purged all old print jobs things were fine.

Another possiblity is that something is taking CPU time, again top will show 
you  top CPU hogs, I believe it sorts according to CPU usage by default, if 
not press P.

There are lots of other possibilities I'd think.  Try dmesg to see if there 
are any interesting kernel messages, check logs, etc.

-- 
Fraser Campbell <fraser-Txk5XLRqZ6CsTnJN9+BGXg at public.gmane.org>                 http://www.wehave.net/
Georgetown, Ontario, Canada                               Debian GNU/Linux

--
The Toronto Linux Users Group.      Meetings: http://tlug.ss.org
TLUG requests: Linux topics, No HTML, wrap text below 80 columns
How to UNSUBSCRIBE: http://tlug.ss.org/subscribe.shtml