Anyone have any idea why my system slows down after about 4 hours? When i say slows down I am referring to the internet and my gui, KDE opens windows (lol) really slow and Mozilla takes forever to open up pages with DSL. Ive done top and ps many times but dont see anything of use as far as resources go. The only thing that helps it to reboot then everything is back to normal, sound familiar? LOL.

The only thing I can think is updatedb is going on. When it slows down, is your HD churning. It can take a while to perform. It isn't CPU intensive, so top may not show it as high, however, anything accessing your HD in parallel will be greatly slowed down.

RO

Try and dowload memtest
this will test your computer for memory leaks, it sounds like you may be having this.

What is your memory like when you slow down??
What is your Swap space like?, you should at least have 512 megs of swap.

Also, what kernel number are you running? It could also be a bug in the kernel you are running....

zLinuxz

The hard drive does sound off every so often. I am running 2.4 kernel. I havent checked my memory when it slows down.512 mb swap? I only have 512 of ram.

Yeah bro, you should have made a Swap partition when you initially installed Linux, this is in case you fill up your Ram Memory....Swap will kick in, and you wont notice the slowing down so much.

However, if your hardrive does sound very often, maybe there is something physically wrong with your drive...??maybe too old?

On my desktop I also often get my HD running, but that is because Linux automatically defrags your hardrive every so often, but my pc never really slows down....

soo....

Memtest does not help identify memory leaks, it only identifies bad memory (these are not the same thing).

Also, saying that Linux automatically defrags the file system is not very accurate. Most Linux file systems are quite resistant to fragmentation, thus not needing a defrag in the first place.

To BajaNick, I would suggest a kernel upgrade, maybe trying out Gnome over KDE or even restarting X every now and then. Still, check that you have a large enough swap partition. What output do you get when you give the "df -h" command?

I had the same problem,- system slowing down after a few hours.

The 'top'-command showed that a process named "famd" used all the system recources. I uninstalled "fam", and after that, everything has been running smooth.

df -h gives this:

Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/hda1 38G 6.0G 32G 17% /

It doesnt look like i have a swap partition huh?
This drive is a WD and not very old at all, like 2 years at most.

OK you *really* need a swap partition. Here's the output of my df -h:

Notice the last one is my swap partition. It may be dangerous to resize partitions - maybe it's best to re-install, making sure you allocate about 512M of swap. Also using "fdisk -l" as root is probably a better way to see what's going on with your hard drive:

Is my output.

Wonder why then when you run Memtest it says... "Checking for memory leaks..."

And Linux being "fragmentation resistant" does not mean Linux doesn't get fragmented, Every hardrive gets fragmented no matter what OS you use.
What Linux does however, is being pro-active and not letting the hardrive fragment for a long time like Windows lets the hardrive do....and when ever Linux detects there is 1% or less fragmentation in the hard disk, it goes ahead and defragments it, and yes, it does it automatically.

Just to clear those 2 points.


And yes, like I mentioned in my previous posts, BajaNick does in fact need a Swap partition, and I gave also the size which at your level Bajanick, you only need to make it the same as your current Ram memory, 512.
You can go up to 1 gig of Swap if you want to.... but you don't have to. Just for your information, anything above 1 gig of Swap is useless, even if you have more than 1 gig of actual Ram memory.

Your best bet at this point is to back up your files, and re-install Linux, and make sure you make at least 3 paritions when you intall Linux:

/boot
/
/Swap

these three are essential in any Linux installation.
/boot is where your booting settings get stored;
/ is where all your file system gets installed
/Swap is your swap partition

Maybe you all use your machines harder than me, but I have stopped putting in swap partitions on newer machines.

I never even got close to using all of my available RAM, let alone need 512 MB of swap.

I only put swap partitions on servers and systems with low memory.

When I installed slack the first time I did not partition for a swap file cuz I thought I had so much ram It wasnt necessary. I will think about it, but I really dont want to reinstall again.

Please don't quote words I did not say. I didn't say Linux is "fragmentation resistant", I said it is "quite resistant to fragmentation". Now that hardly implies no fragmentation occurs.

Regarding automatic defragmentation, there is no such thing. Why would there be tools to defrag ext3 if it did it automatically?

As far as Memtest goes, maybe we're not talking about the same Memtest. I was thinking you were referring to Memtest86. What Memtest are you talking about?

If you wish to argue any of this further please provide some references.

that email in Frag and Defrag is informative, but still doesn't prove that you are right or that I am right.
However, listening to my hardrive work every once in a while for no apparent reason, and looking during boot up and seeing the .2% vary with time....a little but vary.... leads me to believe other wise, and that there is indeed defragmention going on.
Furthermore, I hardly believe that calling it a "voodoo" thing, like they say in that email is the right answer as well.
So maybe we should ask Linus to answer that.

In regard to the Memtest, yeah maybe so, the one I used is just called Memtest,and a friend emailed it to me, so it is possible that it is not the same program.

And those tools are just beta for Linux, cuz no one rally uses them, and they just want to get people to perhaps buy them in the future, which will probably not happen. That company is mostly focused on Windows Defrag, where there lies a real problem.

Hey Guys stop hijacking my thread, LOL
Whats the command to defrag in linux I keep typing /usr/defrag and nothing happens? LMAO

No really, If i reinstall slack and add a swap partition would that stop my system from slowing down after a few hours?