Debian is slow and uses too much RAM

mrmike503 · 04-27-2008, 04:51 PM

I installed Debian etch from the first DVD and then upgraded to lenny by editing the sources.list and using "apt-get distupgrade". The upgrade took about 90 minutes. My friend tells me it took him about 20 minutes to upgrade when he used Debian Sarge in the past. X takes about 5 minutes to start after startx and everything run in X seems very sluggish. Memory usage is also very high according to /proc/meminfo. Any suggestions?

Code:

mike:/# cat /proc/meminfo 
MemTotal:      1036652 kB
MemFree:         44004 kB
Buffers:        169908 kB
Cached:         653876 kB
SwapCached:         12 kB
Active:         522224 kB
Inactive:       389744 kB
HighTotal:      131008 kB
HighFree:          988 kB
LowTotal:       905644 kB
LowFree:         43016 kB
SwapTotal:     1951888 kB
SwapFree:      1951836 kB
Dirty:              64 kB
Writeback:           4 kB
AnonPages:       88156 kB
Mapped:          48548 kB
Slab:            73432 kB
PageTables:       1216 kB
NFS_Unstable:        0 kB
Bounce:              0 kB
CommitLimit:   2470212 kB
Committed_AS:   115844 kB
VmallocTotal:   114680 kB
VmallocUsed:      3332 kB
VmallocChunk:   111192 kB
mike:/#

utanja · 04-27-2008, 05:48 PM

Best to install Lenny directly without upgrading from Etch....you should not have a problem.....

Dutch Master · 04-27-2008, 06:11 PM

What does your sources.list look like? Have a look at trhe sticky on this topic for a suitable example you can copy. Mind you, the Debian dev's recommend using aptitude over apt-get. Perhaps you should start again (fresh install is the quickest way as you don't have any data yet) with a bare basic Etch install, edit your sources.list and then get a full system on your machine. Best of luck chap!

salasi · 04-28-2008, 04:54 AM

Quote:

Memory usage is also very high according to /proc/meminfo. ] X takes about 5 minutes to start after startx and everything run in X seems very sluggish.

Ensure that its not because its running locate (updatedb) or a similar indexing program. Maybe post ps -ef output/is the disk drive working hard at the time?

Quote:

Memory usage is also very high according to /proc/meminfo.

No, its not. Its high according to you, and you seem to be making the usual mistake (see any of the thousands of threads* on the subject).

What you have posted is a system that is using much memory for buffers and cache. This is what a linux system does when it has nothing better to do with the memory. If you look at

Quote:

Buffers: 169908 kB
Cached: 653876 kB

thats 800 M that its using because it has nothing better to do with the ram - the alternative would be not to use the ram in order not to wear it out, and that would be just a bit daft. If you take that away from the total, as the system would do if it was being given something more worthwhile to do with the ram, then you'd see this in a better perspective.

* Actually, I'm probably overstating the case here; it feels like thousands make this error and start threads on the subject, but its probably only a hundred or so.

farslayer · 04-28-2008, 11:31 AM

My first question would be "What are the system Specs ? "

RAM doesn't mean squat if you are running a 486SX 25 CPU... pretty impossible to diagnose a system performance issue from meminfo alone imho.

Are there any errors showing up in /var/log/dmesg ?

What processes and services do you have starting by default ? MySQL ? Apache ? FTPD ? Do you actually need them or did you just install everything ?

Need more info

mrmike503 · 04-29-2008, 03:10 PM

Sorry it took me so long to respond --

Quote:

Originally Posted by farslayer

My first question would be "What are the system Specs ? "

1 GB Ram
Athlon 64 3400 - 1.8 GB
Nvidia Gforce 7400 - 256MB Vid Card

I hope that's what you're looking for...

Quote:

Originally Posted by farslayer

Are there any errors showing up in /var/log/dmesg ?

What processes and services do you have starting by default ? MySQL ? Apache ? FTPD ? Do you actually need them or did you just install everything ?

Would you prefer me to just copy the log, or reboot and copy the log for this? I don't entirely know everything yet, so I just wanna make sure.

farslayer · 04-29-2008, 03:24 PM

I would just search for errors, warnings or failures..

it-etch:~# cat /var/log/dmesg | grep -i error
it-etch:~# cat /var/log/dmesg | grep -i warn
it-etch:~# cat /var/log/dmesg | grep -i fail

no need to see the whole thing.
the output of ls /etc/rc2.d would be informative as well as to what you have running on the system at boot time.

Code:

it-etch:~# ls /etc/rc2.d
K08vmware       S17mysql-ndb-mgm  S20cupsys             S20openbsd-inetd  S20winbind     S89atd        S99stop-bootlogd
K20bittorrent   S18mysql-ndb      S20dbus               S20puppet         S21gdm         S89cron       S99webmin
K20firestarter  S18portmap        S20exim4              S20puppetmaster   S21nfs-common  S90vmware
README          S19hplip          S20hotkey-setup       S20samba          S23ntp         S91apache2
S10sysklogd     S19mysql          S20makedev            S20smartmontools  S23ntp-server  S99rc.local
S11klogd        S20acpid          S20nfs-kernel-server  S20ssh            S89anacron     S99rmnologin

all the S## are services that are starting at boot. many of which are not necessary for a regular desktop. this machine is just for testing things so theres a lot of junk loaded I wouldn't have on my normal desktop.. (mysql, apache, puppet, webmin, vmware,) for instance.. easily disabled by running sysv-rc-conf and un-checking the items I don't want to run.. rc2 is the default run level for Debian.