Hey, no need to send this or core dumps, to the list, now :) You can tell a lot about a system from an lsof dump; you'll also notice "Permission denied" on items which require more access (use root if you want to see all)... hope you're enjoying learning all about your system!
268 was the number of open file handles by firefox (not the # of processes), roughly speaking, at the time you ran that — however, grep could have matched on something else such as a path with "firefox" in a folder name, whether related to a firefox process or not... vmstat and lsof are reporting on realtime info about the processes you're running, as netstat does for netwo. How to read them is well-documented, although it is much more info than most users ever need to know. Google for more or select these random/non-preferred resources: http://www.dedoimedo.com/computers/lsof.html http://www.helpmehost.com/linux/reading-vmstat-in-linux-part-1/ also http://www.linuxhowtos.org/Network/netstat.htm All three of these commands will prefer to the PID of a running process, if you like; but firefox generally has many related PIDs. Just noticed Chris's response, which is a good summary for your situation. If you have very large local mailboxes, that might be crunching your disks... desktop search/indexing might also be too much for your system, so try disabling that if it was on :) Hope this is making more sense now, Ben PS - you may be able to use smartd or even new GUI front-ends for it, to see if your drive have any self-reported failures, check smartd's man page or for example, http://www.linuxjournal.com/content/know-when-your-drives-are-failing-smartd On Thu, Jan 27, 2011 at 3:57 PM, Joseph Weston Morgan <[email protected]>wrote: > *with the vmstat -n 5*,* I get a long list, which this is part of, > * > procs -----------memory---------- ---swap-- -----io---- -system-- > ----cpu---- > r b swpd free buff cache si so bi bo > in cs us sy i d wa > 0 0 3244 6640 44316 185824 4 24 2387 148 393 > 1680 47 13 17 23 > *how do you read this?* > > *and with lsof|grep firefox|wc -l, I get* > wes@kathy:~$ lsof|grep firefox|wc -l > 268 > *Is this the number of processes that are running?* > * > With just the lsof I get a huge amount of information, and I don't know how > to read it either.* > > > thunderbi 1960 wes mem REG 8,6 139256 9274309 > /var/cache/fontconfig/365b55f210c0a22e9a19e35191240f32-le32d4.cache-3 > ...clipped...
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