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mandriva still slow after RAM upgrade


tetsujin29
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Hi,

 

I am running Mandriva 2008 on a intel celeron 2.2Ghz eMachine desktop. I have recently upgraded the RAM from 256 to 756MB, and it is running a lot smoother (installing package no longer slows the machine to a crawl). However right now I have Amorak, a mozilla firefox browser, and a bittrrent download open, and mozilla is extremely slow to the point of crashing. Also I am running the compizfusion 3D desktop. When I do a free -m I get the following:

 

 

			 total	   used	   free	 shared	buffers	 cached
Mem:		   755		744		 11		  0		 16		359
-/+ buffers/cache:		360		394
Swap:		 3992		  0	   3992

 

Is this normal? I can run the same number of programs on a pentium III windows VISTA laptop and it wouldnt crash. Is there one particular program that consumes the most RAM? WHen I use the ¨top¨ command, I see that amorak, X, firefox and bittorrent takes a combined amount of 35% of mem. and about 60% CPU.

 

THanks.

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Your numbers seem correct to me. Mine are actually very similar (with a bit more ram):

[yves@localhost ~]$ free -m
		 total	   used	   free	 shared	buffers	 cached
Mem:		   883		873		  9		  0		 61		365
-/+ buffers/cache:		446		436
Swap:		 1027		  0	   1027

 

Yves.

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Did you run it as root? Use su to get root privileges first, and try again.

 

My bad - I just realized that right after I posted. Here it is: Thanks!

 

acpid 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

alsa 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

atd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

atieventsd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off

avahi-daemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

crond 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

dkms 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

dm 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off

fuse 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

haldaemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

harddrake 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

iptables 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

irqbalance 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

keytable 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

kheader 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

mandi 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

messagebus 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

netfs 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

network 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

network-up 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

numlock 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

partmon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

resolvconf 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

shorewall 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

sound 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

syslog 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

vboxadd-timesync 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

wine 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

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I found Azureus (Vuze) can make a computer with little memory come to crawl especially under Gnome which seems quite heavy on resources. Kde4.1 and XFCE (amazingly kde4.1 even runs lighter than xfce) are far lighter (and kde3.5 a little bit lighter than GNOME).

 

 

 

You can also decrease the swappiness of the kernel, which makes switching between applications faster (though running applications a little slower)

 

with the following command you can set the swappiness:

 

sysctl vm.swappiness=<set value; min=0; max=100; default =60)> (you have to be root to change this value)

 

 

 

try different value between 0 and 20 and work a while to see what works best; I guess with 756MB, 5 would be a good value.

 

to make the setting permanent edit/etc/sysctl.conf and set vm.swappiness= to a value you like

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Here are some of the services we can disable - although check my comments below first to make sure it's OK to do so:

 

atieventsd 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:off 4:off 5:on 6:off

avahi-daemon 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

harddrake 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

netfs 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

resolvconf 0:off 1:off 2:on 3:on 4:on 5:on 6:off

vboxadd-timesync 0:off 1:off 2:off 3:on 4:off 5:on 6:off

 

atieventsd you can safely disable if you don't have an ATI video card in your machine.

avahi-daemon is safe to disable since it just deals with zeroconf stuff

harddrake can be disabled if your not connecting different hardware to your machine all the time otherwise leave enabled

netfs can safely be disabled as it's unlikely you're using nfs

resolvconf can safely be disabled - waste of time in my eyes this one

vboxadd-timesync can be safely disabled if you're not using virtualbox virtualisation on this system

 

Some other services I saw were iptables, mandi and shorewall. If you have a router internet connection that already has a firewall on it, then you don't need these enabled either. To disable a service:

 

chkconfig servicename off

 

replace servicename with one of atieventsd, harddrake, netfs, etc, etc.

 

Also, the vm.swappiness is a good one to do, I normally set this to 10. Also, you can disable un-needed ttys in /etc/inittab. This is how mine looks:

 

# Run gettys in standard runlevels
1:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty1
2:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty2
#3:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty3
#4:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty4
#5:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty5
#6:2345:respawn:/sbin/mingetty tty6

 

notice the # in front of terminals 3-6. I don't do much tty stuff, and two is enough in case my gui stops working. You'll see more than this listed in /etc/inittab, so make sure you get the right lines to disable. Mine is taken from a CentOS installation, although it will probably be identical if not similar under Mandriva.

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THanks for all the help - I disabled several of these entries and reduced the number of ttys. So far I havent seen a noticeable change. Firefox is continuing to stutter whenever I open a new tab or visit a flash-intensive site. Even when I srhink the firefox window there is a stutter to bring it back up again...

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That's not normal for your hardware IMHO. Which desktop are you running, kde or gnome? Whichever it is, try the other and see if the problem goes away. Is beagle enabled? If so disable it. Also, try running without the 3D desktop and see if the problem goes away. That might help limit down what's causing the problem.

Edited by pmpatrick
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