On 1/4/07, andy <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Łukasz Andrzejak wrote: Hi, On 1/4/07, Kumar Appaiah <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 ? -- Pozdrawiam Łukasz Andrzejak
