On Sunday 17 March 2002 10:45 am, jquandt3 wrote:
> Well, I have the same problem on occasion. I cannot say if it is
> related to being online since I have a cable connection, but RAM is
> not my problem. I have 512 MB DDR and my system never touches the
> swap file. I intentionally tried to make it hit the swap file and
> had a hard time getting it below 150 MB.
> Similar symptoms to the previous message. Everything slows down to
> a crawl until reboot. it takes 2 mins for the clock icon to leave
> a program opening in KDE and then it may not actually pop up for
> another 30 sec to 1 min. Even if I just want to open a terminal.
> It does not seem to be related to length of logon time, as it has
> occurred soon after a reboot and after several hours.
One often cause for symtoms like this is a runaway process(es).
When your system gets sluggish, open a terminal and run 'top'.
<Shift+P> will show proccesses usin the most cpu time. Rarely should
it be much over 10% total, much less any one process. Runaway
procceses often show 60% or more and need to be killed ASAP. Which
is what you did with a reboot. 'kill -9 <pid>' would'a fixed it.
A way to constantly monitor, is to use lm_sensors and a GUI for
it (GKrellm). I configure Gkrellm to show just cpu temp which also
displays a little cpu load gauge. I've got it in a window (always on
top, all desktops) less than 1/4" high, about an inch long on the top
right side of my screen (just fits on open windows title bars).
When/if I see cpu temp go to the max, and/or the little cpu gauge
turn red, peg to the right and stay there... I start 'top' and see
who the offender(s) is.
Often I already know tho ;) It's normal to see high cpu usage
during somethin like a kernel && modules compile. It's not normal
tho even when you have dozens of open and running apps, 'cept maybe
for a few seconds here'n there. I've got a dozen running apps right
now, including 2 simultaneous d/l's going over a Net connection...
and the cpu gauge is bouncing on low to -0-, cpu temp is normal.
For Windoze users the whole deal is actually a lot simpler ... the
system just crashes ;)
--
Tom Brinkman Corpus Christi, Texas
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