Alright, to begin here are my system specs: Athlon 64 3200+ 512 MB PC2100 DDR 200 GB SATA 160 GB IDE Nvidia GF4 4000 (128MB)
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.
So I guess my main question is: is the swap space in Linux messed up, or is it simply a problem from Java???
Thanks in advance, John Degenstein