Frequent paging
Ranjan Maitra
maitra at iastate.edu
Sun Mar 13 16:11:42 UTC 2011
On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 10:47:24 -0500 Yorvyk
<yorvik.ubunto at googlemail.com> wrote:
> On Sun, 13 Mar 2011 03:57:35 -0700
> Suvayu Ali <fatkasuvayu+linux at gmail.com> wrote:
>
> > 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?
> >
> There were memory leaks in evince, I don't know if they got fixed.
> One problem I saw was, if you zoomed in then out then in, the memory foot print would increase.
Hi Suvayu,
I agree that epdfview is not something that has a lot of features, but
I have found it to be very lightweight and reasonably good for my
needs. You could try that instead of evince: of course, it is not clear
if that is causing or will solve your problem.
Hope this helps! Good luck with your dissertation!
Ranjan
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