Hi World, I wrote earlier about the system crashes I was experiencing. These often happen when using X and several times when pushing the same button in mailtool.
However, it seems the above is unrelated, for I've been keeping an eye on top recently and it shows the system runs out of memory quite dramatically. My 16 MB swap partition fills up within a day and presumably halts the computer (when using X). Recently I've had to resort to using non-x applications, and since the last reboot I may not even have started X. However the swap is full, and its only been 2 days. (using irc, zless, elm, lynx, vi) Of course I could increase the size of my swap partition (inconvenient) but I don't think this is the solution. There must be something else going on. (with linux 1.2.13 on this 8MB machine, I could leave it running for days on end without ever exiting X, and had uptimes of around 5 months). However, with debian I've started using NIS, mostly in order to be able to keep my home dirs in sync easily. Sometimes sendmail shows up as using a lot of memory resources, and xterms have been known to use 10% memory or more !!! At the moment though, no one process seems to use much in the way of resources, but top reports that there is only a measly 180 K left. In swap. !!! I tried to de-install sendmail, but dselect would have none of it due to dependency problems. dpkg, might accept the deinstall using the force options but I haven't dared yet. I don't need sendmail since /var/spool/mail is nfs mounted from a server onto my machine. And if NIS could be causing all of this havoc, I don't mind doing without it either. BTW: my machine runs much slower now than under slackware 2-2. and its never been fast due to the 8MB memory limitation. These probs may all be unrelated to each other, but then again maybe not. If there is any info I should be supplying which I haven't, I'm sorry. But the problem seems rather abstract ... Thanks for your attention, jay