Need advice on performance troubleshooting

[Gordon Messmer]

On 10/23/2010 09:54 PM, Marko Vojinovic wrote:
> Anyway, you seem to be right! Restarting X purged most of the swap, from
> 1.3 GB it went down to 31.4 MB. And the system regained responsiveness.

Whatever is using swap is probably the application using the most RAM. 
Take a look at 'System Monitor' or the command line tool 'top'.  Either 
can sort processes by memory.  Close programs one at a time until swap 
use drops to find the culprit.

AFAIK, you can't check swap use directly, so that's your only path. 
However, if you have enough "free" memory (which is "free" + "buffers" + 
"cache"), you can force everything in swap back to ram.  Open a 
terminal, "su -" to log in as the root account.  Enter "swapoff -a" to 
disable swap and force its contents to RAM.  Once that happens, you can 
use 'System Monitor' or 'top' to see what applications are using the 
most RAM.  If you're looking at 'top', pay attention to the "RES" column.