aRTee Posted August 22, 2008 Report Share Posted August 22, 2008 The output of your free command shows no swap is used. In other words, you have enough ram, more wouldn't help. What you want is indeed to have the first line tell you that your ram is fully used, and the last line that no swap is used, in which case all is fine, ... output from my current machine: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4052292 3853548 198744 0 255472 2575444 -/+ buffers/cache: 1022632 3029660 Swap: 10233080 148 10232932 (Oh noes, the system ate all my ram!! ) Can you check if there is some disk activity? I noticed that kerry / beagle sometimes keep the disks busy, which is a major cause of slowness. I normally run with gkrellm on the side, just to keep track of high cpu and disk loads (and temps and stuff..). BTW flash can make a Athlon 2400+ stutter, from what I gather also on windows, so go complain to Adobe about that one.. ;) Did you get the new version of FF? Should be in the backports repos somewhere (I'm running 2008.1 x64 on all machines now, and did get FF3 on all of them, just forgot from where I got it). Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
kfoss Posted August 26, 2008 Report Share Posted August 26, 2008 Have you by chance done a memory check on your RAM? Depending on which memory stick is in which memory slot, if one of them has physical errors, then the PC would be spending most of it's time rearranging items in memory to keep them out of bad spots. There are free utilities out there such as: MemTest86 Give this a try before you go any further to make sure that it is not a physical problem. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tetsujin29 Posted August 26, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 26, 2008 The output of your free command shows no swap is used.In other words, you have enough ram, more wouldn't help. What you want is indeed to have the first line tell you that your ram is fully used, and the last line that no swap is used, in which case all is fine, ... output from my current machine: $ free total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 4052292 3853548 198744 0 255472 2575444 -/+ buffers/cache: 1022632 3029660 Swap: 10233080 148 10232932 (Oh noes, the system ate all my ram!! ) Can you check if there is some disk activity? I noticed that kerry / beagle sometimes keep the disks busy, which is a major cause of slowness. I normally run with gkrellm on the side, just to keep track of high cpu and disk loads (and temps and stuff..). BTW flash can make a Athlon 2400+ stutter, from what I gather also on windows, so go complain to Adobe about that one.. ;) Did you get the new version of FF? Should be in the backports repos somewhere (I'm running 2008.1 x64 on all machines now, and did get FF3 on all of them, just forgot from where I got it). Are you saying that there should be NO swap used? because my machine shows: total used free Swap: 3992 0 3992 How do I know if I have the latest FF3? I install the updates regularly so I assume that it is up to date... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medo3891 Posted August 27, 2008 Report Share Posted August 27, 2008 Yes he is saying if no swap is used then the system have enough RAM and doesn't need to use swap. The output you show says the system uses 0 swap. I am not sure installing FF3 will solve the flash problem (or whatever problem) but it might just do this and installing the updated version of an application is the best course of action. FF3 is not released as an update to FF2 in Mandriva so you need to install it from the main/backports repository. You an do this in the Mandriva control centre>s/w management>configure media sources. Next open install & remove software and install firefox 3. Don't forget to disable that repository when you are finished. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tetsujin29 Posted August 27, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 27, 2008 I have done a memtest and there are no errors found. However I noticed that when I do "free -m", only about 850MB of RAM is shown as the total RAM whereas I have 1GB of RAM installed (and the total RAM was indicated to be 1GB when I ran memtest).... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
daniewicz Posted August 28, 2008 Report Share Posted August 28, 2008 The default kernel is only able to see approximately 850 MB of ram, so the behavior you are seeing is normal. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medo3891 Posted August 28, 2008 Report Share Posted August 28, 2008 http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#...to_880MB_of_RAM Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
theYinYeti Posted August 28, 2008 Report Share Posted August 28, 2008 Some graphics cards take RAM for themselves, thus lessening the amount of free RAM for the OS and applications. Yves. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tetsujin29 Posted August 28, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 28, 2008 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. I am running KDE and I will try GNOME. I have alternated between 3D and non-3D desktop and did not see a visible difference. I also tried swiftfox instead of firefox and still didn't work. Just typing in the URL bar of mozilla causes a slowdown (it does the annoying auto-complete thing). Right now mandriva is running slower than my windows laptop.. Does the monitor size has any impact on the speed (e.g. is it a problem with displaying the images on a 22-in monitor?) Thanks for all the post thus far. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medo3891 Posted August 29, 2008 Report Share Posted August 29, 2008 Install htop and run it from terminal and see if there's anything eating up your cpu. Do you have screenlets or superkaramba running? Or something like kiba-dock? Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tetsujin29 Posted August 29, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 29, 2008 http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#...to_880MB_of_RAM Thank you this link describes the problem perfectly. So there is nothing to be gained to switch to kernel-build when I have exactly 1GB.. Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tetsujin29 Posted August 29, 2008 Author Report Share Posted August 29, 2008 Install htop and run it from terminal and see if there's anything eating up your cpu. Do you have screenlets or superkaramba running? Or something like kiba-dock? Did that and nothing really stands out as consuming too much CPU. I think the main problem is with mozilla firefox - connection speed is slower and just typing in the URL bar causes a hiccup... I have tried swiftfox and didnt notice any change. Even my Pentium III laptop running VISTA is faster at loading pages than firefox... Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
medo3891 Posted August 29, 2008 Report Share Posted August 29, 2008 For slow internet browsing try: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#...web_browsing.29 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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