Q about swap size

birger birger at birger.sh
Sun Jul 11 23:56:44 UTC 2010


On Sun, 2010-07-11 at 11:10 -0500, Robert G. (Doc) Savage wrote:
>         top - 10:43:15 up 2 days, 6 min,  5 users,  load average: 8.62, 6.84, 6.26
>         Tasks: 244 total,   7 running, 237 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
>         Cpu(s): 60.7%us, 23.5%sy,  9.2%ni,  0.0%id,  0.0%wa,  5.4%hi,  1.3%si,  0.0%st
>         Mem:    509800k total,   502624k used,     7176k free,    16280k buffers
>         Swap:  1048568k total,   317372k used,   731196k free,   101944k cached

You most certainly have something bogging down the system.

top - 01:45:28 up 2 days,  2:06,  2 users,  load average: 0.34, 0.69,
1.01
Tasks: 163 total,   1 running, 162 sleeping,   0 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s):  8.6%us,  5.0%sy,  0.0%ni, 86.0%id,  0.3%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.0%si,
0.0%st
Mem:    509908k total,   493208k used,    16700k free,     6464k buffers
Swap:  2097144k total,   108544k used,  1988600k free,   128324k cached

This is my Intel P4 system with 512MB RAM. I have tweaked Gnome a bit to
make it leaner, like no gradients on window frames and so on. Nothing
that you would really notice. I now have a terminal window, Evolution
and Firefow (2 windows, >10 tabs) up and running. As you can see from
the numbers, my system runs this load just fine.

I'm low on buffers compared to you even if I have more available memory.
Does that mean you have some process doing I/O?

With a load average of 8 something must be running in the background. I
don't think your slower CPU can take the blame for so many processes
stacking up. I have a Compaq Armada M300 or something like that in a
closet. It has F12 or F13 installed, and ran spotify in wine without
dropouts. Using Gnome.

Linux still rocks on old equipment once you disable the cpu and memory
hogs. I don't really see the need for killing gnome.

-- 
birger




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