Hi everyone.

My first post, I'll keep it short and sweet.

Just installed Redhat 7.3 on my new machine. Install went fine, everything seemed to work. Booted OK, and runs fine for a few minutes.

As soon as I login, looking at procinfo shows that around 165/256 MB of my memory is in use. If I use a few progs like kedit or anything, even simple games, the memory soon runs out and my swap starts being used?

After this, I slowly lose resposiveness and then the machine hangs. Logging out and back in doesn't help.

Any ideas? I've poked around google, can't find much interesting.

Specs:

RH 7.3
Athlon XP2000+
256 MB Crucial DDR 2700 (333mhz) Cas 2.5
MSI KT3 Ultra-ARU
Gainward Geforce4 Ti200
40GB Maxtor HD, 7.2k
AC97 Audio
Creative 5300 (I think) speakers
No modem, ethernet, etc.

Got Win98 on there too, dual boots fine.

Thanks very much for any help.
Thomas

Run top to see what's eating all the resources, it shouldn't be happening on such a rig, but among the suspects are unneeded services and RAM.

Had problems getting my top output onto a disk etc etc, (I'll work on it).

The process of slowing then crashing is much slower on Gnome..?

top says I have 58 processes. The most hungry process is X, around about 4% of memory.

But the used memory gradually goes up and up... shouldn't it go down when it's not used? I'll leave it and see if it does eventually crash.

The situation is similar with KDE (3.0.0) but it uses far more memory, in a small time (about 5-10 mins), and I don't appear to be doing anything stressful.

If the top output is really needed, I'll just copy it out.

Thanks.

1. try to disable all unnecessary services loaded on boot
2. search this board for "linux eats memory/no memory left" and similar to get to know something on Linux memory behaviour
3. have a line (w/o quotes) in /etc/syslog.conf, make the file, and restart syslogd: "*.* /var/log/catchall" to catch all errors the system spits out, might catch anything usefull.
4. Check /var/log(messages|dmesg) for errors
5. switch to a lighter window manager like IceWM, Blackbox, Fluxbox, Twm, etc.
6. Try to unload all applets and background services when loading X11

For everything you unload try to enable them one at a time to try isolate errors.

It also sound like cron might be running things in the background. Check and see what cron jobs are set to automatically run.