On Wednesday 13 March 2002 22:31, Gerald Waugh wrote: > On Wed, 13 Mar 2002, cervix couch wrote: > > >%_ > > > > I've been having a problem in Linux and I have no idea where to look for > > the culprit. > > > > My problem is that, periodically, while I'm online (and only when I'm > > online), the system will get extremely sluggish to the point where I > > usually have to power down and reboot. > > > > When this happens, there are sounds like there's a lot of hard disk > > activity going on and it never stops. > > > > I've tried unplugging the modem, but it doesn't do any good. > > > > Does anyone know why this happens? > > THRASHING!!! > You need more RAM > Linux is trying to run swapping everything back and forth to the hard drive
Given that it only happens online, it sounds like it could be more than a simple RAM problem, though getting a lot of RAM might well solve it. for a quick check, while offline, run a lot of RAM-heavy processes at the same time. For example, open the GIMP, get it to do some complicated rendering on a couple of big graphics files (or better still, do some 3D rendering ,f you have a program like Blender), then open StarOffice, then, hell, I don't know, compile some source code or something. If the system doesn't complain too much while it's doing all this, you do _not_ have a RAM problem. If it's purely an online phenomenon, the culprit could be fetchmail, which can slow things down a lot, or possibly Netscape, which is a real RAM-hog, and sometimes chokes while trying to load a dodgy plugin (4.* is notoriously buggy; 6.2 is much better, but seems to use even more RAM). Again, you can test by disabling the fetchmail daemon if it's running, then opening a nice simple web page in Konqueror. You might also want to check that you haven't inadvertantly instaled some servers that you don't actually want to use (sounds silly, but it happens). BTW, for a typical workstation install, 64MB of RAM should be enough (though you might want to cook dinner while you wait for Star Office to open) and 128MB is plenty. If you want to do stuff like video capture or 3D animation, you'll need a lot more, and a fast processor into the bargain. At the other extreme, I've run Mandrake with 32MB of RAM, but that was too slow to run KDE (IceWM worked fine). Robin
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