On Mon, 20 Nov 2000, Stephen Ryan wrote:
> On 20 Nov, Bourdon, Bruce wrote:
> > I have Red Hat Linux 7 running on a Pentium P1 200 with 32 MB Ram and 8 GB
> > hard drive.
> >
> > I noticed that the hard drive LED was flickering about once a second while
> > in X (witnessed in KDE and GNOME) but goes away if I exit X Windows.
> >
> > I left the system alone in X for hours Saturday. When I returned the hard
> > drive was running continuously and it took about ten seconds for the mouse
> > pointer to move in response to physically moving the mouse.
> >
> > Any Ideas?
> >
> > Also, I had Win95 on this box (still got it on a seperate drive) & browsing
> > there is MUCH faster than Linux/Netscape.
> >
> > Does this make sense?
> >
> > Bruce.
>
> Yes, it makes sense. You have all the classic symptoms of not
> enough memory. Your problem is right here:
>
> > I have Red Hat Linux 7 running on a Pentium P1 200 with 32 MB Ram and 8 GB
> ^^
> and
> > in X (witnessed in KDE and GNOME)
> ^^^ ^^^^^
>
I believe that something else is going on. Why would an idle system behave
this way ? Granted, this system is light on memory but it should work. I
used KDE with 32 meg for months and while it kinda sucked, it worked. And I
never had mysterious disk activity or any of these other symptoms. Well,
that's not completely true. Mouse latency often did become a problem when I
was seriously abusing my system (Netscape AND mail AND a news reader AND a
couple of of games AND StarOffice).
> If you use "free" or "top" to find out how much memory you're using,
> I'll bet you find it is way over 32 MB. Neither KDE nor Gnome is very
> lightweight as far as the memory footprint goes - I had a PowerMac with
> 16MB that used KDE as the default desktop, and I'm pretty sure that it
> was using 48MB immediately after boot. Admittedly, I think that
> machine was using more memory than an x86 machine would, because it was
> that weird Linux-on-top-of-a-Mach-microkernel design, but not by more
> than about 2 megabytes. When you add Netscape to the mix, I think
> you're hitting swap space constantly.
>
> You may want to look into using one of the lighter weight GUIs instead
> of KDE or Gnome - e.g. use blackbox or WindowMaker. They won't be
> anywhere near as feature-full, but then again, they won't put you into
> swap space instantly, either.
> --
> Stephen Ryan Debian GNU/Linux
> Technology Coordinator
> Center for Educational Outcomes,
> C. Everett Koop Institute at Dartmouth College
>
>
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Standard is better than better. If your web page cares what browser I'm using
it's broken.
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