top provides an interactive view in a terminal, and there are many variants for X, which often go under varying names like 'system monitor' in the menuing system
RAM is likely to be a big part of your problem - how much ram and swap do you have (run the program "free" in a terminal to find out). My son's pII 433 (128M RAM) goes fine on kde, not snappy like a modern machine, but very usable. Also check what services you are running. In a terminal (as root) run ntsysv and see what services are turned on by default. turn off those not required. NB, this does not turn off the service, it sets whether it is turned on in your present runlevel. to turn a service off now run: service sendmail stop where sendmail is the service you wish to terminate. Recompiling your kernel is a moderately complex affair, first you need the kernel sources that redhat supply. (Actually you can use any kernel sources, but IMHO it is best to start with what redhat supply. They heavily patch their kernel and if you start using another set of sources you are going to find that things that worked with the redhat kernel suddenly don't work any more!) However I would work on reducing your services and buying another stick of RAM first. You might also want to use a less hungry window manager like windowmaker, fluxbox, xfce. (This can be the start of a religious war if I am not careful). Also you are right , evolution is a fine email client, but very resource hungry. try sylpheed if you want a lightweight one. Frankly your machine may be a little underpowered to experience the full glory of a modern OS, I suspect XP would be sluggish too (now I 'll get flamed for mentioning XP in the context of a modern OS). Don't tell me W98 runs well on it, its too old. A 1998 linux distro would probably run fine too, except, like 98, it would be a security nightmare! On Mon, 24 May 2004 09:28:54 +1200 Don Gould <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: > How do I find out what things are taking up memory and processor time? > > I'm sure that RH9 on a PIII-450 shouldn't be this bad. > > It takes up to 10 seconds just to open a new mail message and minutes to > open or close things like mail reader and web browser. > > Coming back from screen saver is a slow process as well. > > I suspect I've just got to much crap from the kernel up. > > Are there any good wizard tools or do I need to use a set of complex CLI > commands? > > Cheers Don > > Ps: Still loving this mail reader. -- Nick Rout <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
