Lorenzo Milesi wrote:
slowliness and memory leaks: taking ages to load pictures, filling my 500mb ram quickly. It's really weird!
What exactly is filling up memory? Try running top and sorting by memory use (shortcut key "M"). 500MB of RAM isn't a huge amount - certainly plenty for ordinary use but if you have two X displays, 15 daemons, 12 web browsers, and OpenOffice running you're going to run out fast. You'll definitely run into problems if you're running emerge while doing other work as well, as large builds will use much of that 500MB of RAM and will keep that memory tied up with active use.
I need to be careful about kicking off stuff like simultaneous emerges and vmware/etc, and I have 2GB of RAM. Granted, I'm also running postfix, samba, mythtv, and apache. 2GB of RAM is plenty for all of that but I can't pretend that I can launch several RAM-intensive tasks at once and not get glitches in my mythtv recordings.
Your 500MB of RAM is probably OK, but only if you use the system primarily as a desktop, and avoid launching emerge while you're running other memory-hungry apps (vmware, openoffice, etc). And if you're multitasking make good use of nice/ionice. You're not running on server-class hardware, so you can't pretend that you are even if running servers is just a matter of rc-update add foo default...
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