This is just the opposite problem that I have. When I first boot up it seems that everything is slow. I click on the applications tab and it can take 30 seconds before it shows up. I start a desktop app and again it will take 30-50 seconds before it comes up. Once I have run a few apps etc. and things are cached, then the problem seems to go away. Until my memory fills up.
Why is Gnome so unresponsive before things are cached. I'm running a 2GHz system with 512Megs of RAM, and 7200 rpm PATA 133 hard drive.
Robert
On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 10:41 -0800, Daniel Buggie wrote:
On Thu, 2006-02-23 at 12:21 -0600, John Degenstein wrote:
This is a problem I have been trying to fix for several months now, and I am pretty sure it is the swap space on this computer has something to do with it. When I first start up the computer it is blazing fast, and I have no problem filling 4 workspaces up with resource intensive programs. But as the days and weeks wear on the computer gets progressively slower, to the point where simply switching between workspaces with only 3 or 4 programs open becomes incredibly slow. The problem also seems to relate to programs that use Java, such as azureus and qnext, it seems to me that there is some kind of memory leak that builds up in the swap space over time. Even after the swap space has been filled I attempt to clear it by closing all open programs, but this has no effect and it is beginning to drive me crazy.
I did manage to find a command which I somehow got to work at least several times: swapoff -a /dev/logVol00/_something_here
This command alleviated my problems immediately, but then I started to get errors about running out of memory from new programs I was trying to open so I enabled swap again with the command "swapon". Another possible source of my problems is the fact I am running PC2100 DDR rather than the minimum that my motherboard supposedly supports, PC2700, because of this I had to underclock some of the components on my mobo so that the computer would boot.
Swap performance could be impacted by how your swap partitions are set up (for example, multiple swap partitions on the same physical disk with equal priority could cause your drive to thrash). How do you have your swap space set up? Since you are using Logical Volume, please also include what PV the swap space is on. Perhaps fine tuning your swap space could at least delay the memory leak issues.
Beyond that, have you tried "swapon -a" after your swapoff command? If your intent was to clear the swap space by removing it from the system, why not add it back in?
Daniel