Hey,

Yeah, so I've just recently started using Linux, and hadn't really noticed or cared until now, but under KDE logged in as a normal user, with nothing running but firefox, I have 113 running processes. That seems a bit high to me, but I've just come from Windows, so I don't really know for sure (I have about 35 processes normally running in XP). Was wondering what a normal number for Linux would be, and if this is abnormally high, how to remove processes (I know how to kill processes, but how do you stop them from coming back? Is there any sort of equivalent to "msconfig" in Windows?)

Thanks in advance.

I don't use Mandrake anymore, so I'm not going to advise you on how you can eliminate overhead specifically on that system. What I will do is point you in the right direction.

If you've just installed, you've likely chosen a bunch of services that you might not actually need. Some of these may include:

-sshd (enables you to log into your machine remotely with an ssh session)
-smbd & nmbd (file sharing with samba)
-apache httpd (web server)
-mysql (database)

To see if these are running, I believe you can use the command 'chkconfig', and to turn them off you can do 'chkconfig [service name] off'.

Check to see if you actually need them and eliminate as needed. On average though, Linux runs a lot of little process. To really diagnose if those processes are taking up too much of your system is to use the 'top' command. Type that into a terminal and you'll get a report similar to that of the task manager in windows. Look at how much ram/cpu is being used and make a judgement on what to get rid of or not.

First off, MS doesn't identify all of the processes the same way that linux does. Under KDE, you'll normally get a kdeinit process and the actual process:

plewis 7080 7004 0 09:41 ? 00:00:10 kdeinit: konqueror -session 11c0a847c9000111480366500000043240037_1115242822_473891 -display :0.1
plewis 7501 7437 3 11:29 pts/5 00:00:00 konqueror

Your konCurrently on my redhat es3 box, I have 126 processes. If you want to cut down on processes, go to your services manager. It is under drakxservices. WARNING, before you stop any services, know what they are. If you don't know, feel free to ask someone. Also, I find linux handles sleeping processes a lot better then the windows platform. The program "top" will show cpu/memory usage.

Thanks guys, I'll give that a try.