Hey all, quick question

I have a 2ghz P4 with 512 RAM and Slack 10.1.

when I first boot the computer, everything runs great, fast and fine.

As I keep it on, my performance degrades drastically (and I'm talking within 5 hours of boot or so).

I'm talking about slow program/windows load times, programs "wiping" off the screen, etc.

I'm using KDE 3.3

I understand that KDE is fairly memory intensive, but I don't think that it would be this bad and in this manner.

When I look at the System Monitor, my CPU usage is usually in the high 90s, close to 100%, but my memory is being used at a normal rate.

Any ideas?

my system running KDE and a few server daemons -- apache, mysqld, and sshd -- usually runs at a load of 0.00 ... You've definitely got a runaway process.

for example, the 'uptime' command gives me this:

What's your load average?
Also, check with the 'top' command, to see what's got so much activity.

--Shade

I agree that running "top" is an excellent recommendation, and that you most likely have one or more runaway processes. One other thought is that if your machine consistently starts acting up after X amount of time, you may have an overheating problem. Overheating is a common source of instability, and if your system typically starts going south after 5 hours, give or take, you might want to check that all the fans are running properly -- J.W.

My uptime looks like this:

17:08:05 up 30 min, 1 user, load average: 1.11, 1.33, 1.36


after, as you can see 30 minutes. (5 hours the first time was a semi-educated guess.). Those values deviate a little bit

I don't think that overheating is the culprit here, as I have no real problems when I boot to my Windows XP partition (sorry, should have mentioned that earlier.)

running the top command displays this:

2450 root 20 0 155m 26m 4604 R 73.4 5.3 15:33.19 X
3028 crithke 10 0 30876 30m 9048 R 16.4 6.0 1:20.22 realplay.bin
2579 crithke 9 0 16372 15m 14m R 4.3 3.2 0:02.24 kdeinit
2909 crithke 9 0 41024 40m 18m R 1.6 8.0 0:40.67 firefox-bin
3048 crithke 10 0 30876 30m 9048 S 1.3 6.0 0:31.40 realplay.bin
2555 crithke 9 0 15096 14m 13m S 1.0 2.9 0:03.98 kdeinit
2561 crithke 9 0 16924 16m 15m S 1.0 3.3 0:03.42 kdeinit
2563 crithke 9 0 17956 17m 15m S 0.7 3.5 0:02.58 kdeinit
10837 crithke 11 0 1048 1048 824 R 0.7 0.2 0:00.59 top
1 root 8 0 228 228 200 S 0.0 0.0 0:06.33 init
2 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.03 keventd
3 root 19 19 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 ksoftirqd_CPU0
4 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.16 kswapd
5 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 bdflush
6 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 kupdated
10 root -1 -20 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.00 mdrecoveryd
11 root 9 0 0 0 0 S 0.0 0.0 0:00.18 kjournald

At the moment I have firefox, kmail, gaim, and xmms running


Does this shed any light on the issue for anyone?

Are you running realplayer?

Realplay.bin is the suspect in my eyes -- there's no reason for it to be running if you're not presently trying to view a realmedia file. Also, having it listed twice makes it double-suspicious.

Wait a few minutes, and see what your load average is then

--Shade