My Thinkpad T61 had two 1-GB sticks in it for a couple of years. Last
November I replaced them with two brand new 2-GB sticks.
Everything continued to work fine until this morning. Suddenly
everything was running very slow. I was unable to send a 40 MB PDF file
to a printer, even with the cp command. The System > Administration >
System Monitor GUI and top did not show anything unusual, except that
xorg would cycle up and down between 7-8% CPU and 50-60%. I had been
using Xsane quite a lot over the previous 24 hours, so I suspected a
memory leak. I did free at the command line and it appeared that all
four GB were used up and I was into the 4 GB swap partition.
I started trying to repair the problem by shutting down all running
programs, starting with Xsane. Nothing helped. Eventually I rebooted.
And when X tried to come up I got that endless loop between the nVidia
splash screen and a command line. (I've seen this before on occasion,
althopugh I don't recall if it was my computer or someone else's at the
Clinic.) I couldn't get it to stop the looping long enough to take an
Alt-F1 command, so I rebooted again in recovery mode, and then got a
root command line.
All I did at the command line was switch /etc/X11/xorg.conf from the
nVidia driver to the nv driver by editing it with nano. Then I rebooted
to the normal boot option. When it came up it took forever, but
eventually X came up, I got a login prompt, and here I am back with a
functioning computer (sans nVidia driver).
Side comment: This time the nVidia splash screen did not come up, so I
assume I'm using the nv driver. However, I know that when someone is
using the nVidia driver the text in the login boxes will be very large.
When using the nv driver the username and password asterisks will
appear much smaller. OK, this time I did not get the nVidia splash
screen, but I did get the supersized text. Not sure what that means. A
command to find out which driver I'm actually using at the moment would
be helpful.
But here is the real issue. The computer is running, but it takes way
too long for stuff to happen. Just opening a terminal window takes 30
seconds, where it should pop up in three or four seconds.
Here is what I get for memory usage:
j...@devil7:~$ free
total used free shared buffers
cached Mem: 3988812 3964632 24180 0
16844 2912324 -/+ buffers/cache: 1035464 2953348
Swap: 3903752 2320 3901432
I do not know how to read the above. It appears that it is using all 4
GB or RAM and also some of the swap. Yet I just rebooted. The only
thing that is running is the terminal window and Sylpheed (mail
client). If it is using that much RAM, something is seriously wrong.
Suggestions needed!
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