Turning off unwanted programs to speed things up...

[Scot L. Harris]

On Fri, 2004-07-09 at 10:54, Andrew Konosky wrote:
> I did an almost complete install of Fedora Core 2, even though I didn't 
> know what half the stuff is or really need it, I have plenty of disk 
> space with my new hard drive, but it is memory usage that is the 
> problem. On startup I have 75% in use. I'm not familiar with how linux 
> manages memory, but I know my system goes to 100% real fast, and I have 
> 512mb. Is there a program where I can tweak what is loaded on startup in 
> order to free up some memory? When running in windows 98, I have tweaked 
> my system up good for gaming and have about 90% of the system resources 
> free at startup and most of the memory. I don't do much gaming in linux 
> (tried through wine, but doesn't perform very well), so I don't need it 
> that freed up, but I think I need to get rid of some things.

Probably the easiest thing to do is go through the
system-config-services applet and turn off services you do not use.

Depending on what you do with the system you may be able to turn off
httpd, sendmail, spamassassin, imap, ipop2, ipop3, named, pop3s, mysql,
postgresql, etc.  

You will need to decide which things you use and which you don't.  

However the real issue is that it looks like you have no memory left. 
Others on the list may be able to give a much better explanation, but as
I understand it Linux will allocate memory and hold it until some other
process needs it.  so while you may be showing 90% of memory being used
if you start another process memory will be freed up for that process.

The thing to look out for is high usage on swap.  If you start swapping
memory to disk then your performance can be impacted.  

Use the command top to monitor your system resources.  top will tell you
what processes are running and what resources they are using.  It will
also show you the swap usage as well as memory usage.

512MB of memory is pretty good.  I am actually running a server with
only 256MB of memory and have had no problems.  But I recommend 512MB
minimum for new systems since memory is relatively cheap at the moment.


-- 
Scot L. Harris
webid at cfl.rr.com

Get hold of portable property.  -- Charles Dickens, "Great Expectations"