Fedora 10 (KDE, LAMP): Is 1GB of RAM enough?

sheepy · 01-29-2009, 09:09 AM

I'm currently running Fedora 10 (KDE spin) on my HP510 (1.5ghz Celeron, 1GB Ram) and it runs hellishly slow. Once I am in a program and working it is fine, but switching between them, or having many open, results in the computer grinding to a halt. Sometimes switching between windows, and then being impatient by clicking on that window before it has loaded up can cause that program to crash.

I've just booted up, only have firefox running, but have Apache/MySQL daemons running in the background, and I am using 800mb of RAM. Eventually this number leaps to nearly 1GB, leaving me with about 15mb of RAM free, but it doesn't even try to use it's swap space. It has the default partitioning, so has given itself a 2GB swap partition, but it is always 100% free.

I have tried all sorts of distros over the past few years, and never seem to settle with one, though I have been using mainly Red Hat family distros as of late. Using KDE3 on CentOS seemed much nippier, I'm considering switching away from KDE to XFCE.

Unless it could be sorted by simply configuring my LAMP stack to use less resources? I have Apache, MySQL and PHP with their default settings that I just use for web development testing. But when just left idle they only appear to be using 15mb of ram and 0% cpu, though the computer seems constantly under load and slow to react regardless as to whether I am doing any development testing.

I just popped the XFCE live cd in, didn't feel any quicker, but to be fair it's hard to judge without installing it.

ronlau9 · 01-29-2009, 09:48 AM

If it is some help I install KDE GNOME XFCE LXDE
LXDE seems to be the most fast one , followed by XFCE
But I run X86_64 version , and used 4 GB of RAM , before upgrading used 2 GB
The difference between 2 GB and 4 GB is not so much

alan_ri · 01-29-2009, 09:53 AM

Well,I use KDE4,and I have 1 GB of RAM and there is always around 380MB in use,no matter what I do,but you didn't say what is eating your memory,what process/es?Also,what services are running?

sheepy · 01-29-2009, 11:29 AM

Looking at the results from top doesn't seem to shed any light on the matter. Highest RAM usage is firefox at about 100mb, then X at about 35mb, and the rest are insignificant. CPU seems to be yoyoing between being busy and idle, but nothing stands out as being high usage.

I have been reading up about LXDE this afternoon, so will try that later!

sheepy · 01-29-2009, 11:33 AM

Code:

top - 17:30:38 up  2:45,  3 users,  load average: 0.08, 0.21, 0.27
Tasks: 142 total,   1 running, 140 sleeping,   1 stopped,   0 zombie
Cpu(s): 18.9%us,  3.7%sy,  0.0%ni, 74.1%id,  3.0%wa,  0.0%hi,  0.3%si,  0.0%st
Mem:   1025552k total,  1008584k used,    16968k free,    29392k buffers
Swap:  2064376k total,        4k used,  2064372k free,   503480k cached

  PID USER      PR  NI  VIRT  RES  SHR S %CPU %MEM    TIME+  COMMAND
 2280 root      20   0  348m  65m  16m S 14.0  6.5  17:12.61 X
 2707 luke      20   0  134m  24m  15m S  5.3  2.4   0:03.17 yakuake
 2849 luke      20   0  288m 137m  24m S  0.7 13.7   8:06.75 firefox
 4306 luke      20   0 72788  12m 8076 S  0.7  1.2   0:02.18 npviewer.bin
 1699 haldaemo  20   0  7112 4704 4012 S  0.3  0.5   0:20.24 hald
 1882 root      20   0 17364 2268 1888 S  0.3  0.2   0:14.20 NetworkManager
 2673 luke      20   0  143m  19m  10m S  0.3  1.9   0:15.40 knotify4
 4336 luke      20   0  2428 1100  848 R  0.3  0.1   0:00.17 top
    1 root      20   0  2008  776  568 S  0.0  0.1   0:01.10 init
    2 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kthreadd
    3 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 migration/0
    4 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.15 ksoftirqd/0
    5 root      RT  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 watchdog/0
    6 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.23 events/0
    7 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khelper
   80 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kintegrityd/0
   82 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.10 kblockd/0
   84 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpid
   85 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kacpi_notify
  159 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 cqueue
  163 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:05.39 ata/0
  164 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ata_aux
  166 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 ksuspend_usbd
  171 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 khubd
  174 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.05 kseriod
  210 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 pdflush
  211 root      20   0     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.25 pdflush
  212 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.03 kswapd0
  260 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 aio/0
  449 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:02.53 scsi_eh_0
  452 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 scsi_eh_1
  505 root      15  -5     0    0    0 S  0.0  0.0   0:00.00 kpsmoused

alan_ri · 01-29-2009, 12:10 PM

Ok,please post the output of this two commands;
1.

Code:

sar

2.

Code:

ps -eo pcpu,pid,user,args | sort -r -k1 | less

If you can get any output run yum install sysstat.

salasi · 01-29-2009, 12:55 PM

Quote:

Eventually this number leaps to nearly 1GB, leaving me with about 15mb of RAM free, but it doesn't even try to use it's swap space.

This is normal, because of the way that linux works (if it sees RAM that would be of no other use, Linux uses it for buffers; when some other use comes along it uses less for buffers, until, basically, all the ram that was being used for buffers is gone and then it uses swap).

John VV · 01-29-2009, 11:48 PM

with apache running and using the computer for other things . 1 gig is NOT enough ram ,2 gig min

sheepy · 01-30-2009, 04:23 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by John VV

with apache running and using the computer for other things . 1 gig is NOT enough ram ,2 gig min

The LAMP stack is only accessible on localhost, and there are only a few virtualhosts for sites I am developing/testing. Never had a problem with LAMP on KDE3 on my last laptop which had a 1ghz processor and 512mb of ram.

Installed LXDE now, using 400/1000mb of ram now. Much smoother.

John VV · 01-30-2009, 11:33 AM

testing only so only YOU are viewing the sites ,then that wont use up the sys ram.
have you read through the how to on the services

http://www.mjmwired.net/resources/mjm-services-f10.html
some can be turned off