Today, Tom Rauschenbach gleaned this insight:
>
> 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
One example would be, let's say the screensaver kicked in. The X server
requires memory to display the screen saver, and the screensaver itself
requires memory for its data. Both obviously also require memory for
program code.
If memory were low enough, these two processes could compete with
eachother for available memory. The screen saver can't run without the X
server, and the X server is trying to display data from the screen saver.
Gridlock. :( Result: thrashing swap disk. These days swap space is
usually on the same disk as some (or all) of your filesystems, given the
size of disks. So this can make you think you have a disk I/O problem
when really you have a memory problem. If my point isn't clear, it's that
if your swap were on its own disk, and it was racing, there is no other
explanation, so you'd know right away that it was a memory problem.
Now, is this scenario likely in this case? I dunno... depends on how low
his memory is, but that's my first best guess. My own experience with X +
Gnome/KDE is that 32MB just isn't enough. But it depends on what you're
running.
XF4 is kinda weird too... my X server claims to have a resident set size
of 249MB, but I only have 256MB of RAM (the kernel itself is using about
4MB according to dmesg). I don't quite understand the mechanics of X
server's memory usage (and if someone does, please go on at lenght!) plus
my memory is being reported as only about half in use. So that's
obviously not quite accurate. The card itself has 32MB on board, so it
isn't simply playing tricks with that memory... I don't get it.
--
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...
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Derek D. Martin
Unix/Linux Geek
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
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