I am quite a beginner, but I can explain some of what I have learned so far. I cannot tell what is happening in your case for sure, but I can give you some ideas how to check it:
- Check with KSystemGuard (you can find it in Start->System, most probably you know already and I am explaining too much... :-)). There you can see the memory usage, including the swap. If you check the Physical memory, you can see that is shared between applications, buffers and caches. This is because Linux tries to make the most use of the non-needed memory for speeding up the system. So it keeps cached the areas being accessed on the Hard Disk lately. Only the "blue" part belongs to the applications. Linux will shrink the cached area if the applications need more memory. So it could well be happening, that when you open more applications, then the cached area is freed and that info is writen to the Hard Disk, so that is why you have heavier use of the disk on those moments, but this should only last for a while and stop after the new applications are opened. You can monitor the evolution of the memory use yourself and see the behaviour in your system. - I don't know how it is really meassured the total load. It can be a combination of the CPU use and Memory use. So if you are running out of memory and there is no swap memory, the load maybe can get that high. I am just guessing. Maybe after installing the swap your load will get lower, since the total amount if virtual memory will be much higher. Good luck. -- Edgy is slow and can't handle multiple apps well https://launchpad.net/bugs/73887 -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs
