Today, Stephen Ryan gleaned this insight:
> > 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.
[SNIP]
> > Does this make sense?
>
> 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)
> ^^^ ^^^^^
It's really difficult to say for certain without seeing memory statistics
and a ps output, but I'm inclined to agree. The unresponsive mouse in
particular sounds like the X server is paging. I'd especially think that
if your screen saver was running (and stopped when you finally did move
the mouse) and the constant disk activity stopped after you got response
from the mouse.
>
> 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.
Agreed. Not too long ago (well, around when RH6.1 came out), I had 64MB
of RAM in my system, and almost no swap space, because at the time I
didn't need it. After I upgraded to 6.1 I started running gnome or KDE to
try them out, and my system crashed fairly consistently, because it ran
out of memory. I added RAM and swap and the problem went away.
This was with a fair amount of stuff running, but it doesn't really
matter. I just did a ps ux to see the processes I have running (i.e. NOT
root processes) and the RSS for just MY processes alone totals about 45MB.
Now, I'm sure it would be smaller on a system with less memory, but the
point is if you got it, it will be used. The only thing I'm running, by
the way, is my default gnome session (launched via xdm), plus xconsole, 4
xterms, and pine. My window manager is Enlightenment. The only other
processes are the ones started by the boot process
When it first came out, KDE was worse than gnome (for me), but I think the
1.2 releases flipped that.
The continuously running drive seems a bit suspicious, but I suppose if
you had any background processes running previously, and then your screen
saver started running, it could cause thrashing if you were low enough on
virtual memory (all running processes would each take turns paging in and
out). I can't think of anything that would be more likely to cause this
kind of behavior (not to say that there couldn't be other reasons).
Especially when you consider that X servers are renowned for having memory
leaks (though mostly older ones), as is Netscape. If you're running RH7
you're probably also running XF4.0.1 which had known issues for some
cards; though I have no idea what they are I wouldn't be at all surprised
to find out that there were memory leaks.
Next time you see this, take a look at (or post if you like) the output to
the free command, and take note of the "free" column in the row labeled
"swap". If that number is zero or very low compared to total, then you
can be pretty sure you have a memory problem. Free mem will also be very
low (in the hundreds of K or lower, likely).
If that isn't what you see, it may be something else.
--
You know that everytime I try to go where I really want to be,
It's already where I am, cuz I'm already there...
------------------
Derek D. Martin
Unix/Linux Geek
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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