Frequent paging

[Suvayu Ali]

Hi Fedorans,

My workstation has been paging a lot lately. It's a fairly high-end
system, Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 @ 3.6 GHz (overclocked, originally it was
3.0 GHz) and 2x2GB Corsair RAMs.

lshw output:
*-memory
     description: System Memory
     physical id: 19
     slot: System board or motherboard
     size: 4GiB
   *-bank:0
        description: DIMM 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
        physical id: 0
        slot: A0
        size: 2GiB
        width: 64 bits
        clock: 800MHz (1.2ns)
   *-bank:2
        description: DIMM 800 MHz (1.2 ns)
        physical id: 2
        slot: A2
        size: 2GiB
        width: 64 bits
        clock: 800MHz (1.2ns)

and my swap is 6 Gigs.

$ free -m
             total       used       free     shared    buffers     cached
Mem:          3961       3772        188          0        328       1129
-/+ buffers/cache:       2315       1645
Swap:         6143        153       5990


I used to be able to have uptimes of the order of a month without ever
using a single Kb of my swap. But lately I start paging from a few Mb to
several hundred Mb after about half a week. Whenever this happens, I
find multitasking becomes impossible, e.g. opening a pdf interferes with
music or video playback.

I noticed a weak pattern, usually when I find my workstation is paging I
have a few pdfs open. Lately I have been working with a lot of pdfs and
most of these pdfs are about thousand page long documents (but only ~
20-30 Mb in file size). I keep these open for reference as I work on my
thesis. However closing evince doesn't help reduce the swap usage (at
least not within the next 15-20 minutes).

Apart from these symptoms I also find my system has become generally
slow. Even opening the terminal or thunar (the XFCE file browser) takes
a few seconds. I am on 2.6.34.8-68.fc13.x86_64. Does any one have any
culprits in mind?

-- 
Suvayu

Open source is the future. It sets us free.