Hi guys ,
I have a wierd problem... my machine conf is as follows

i440zx motherboard (intel chipset)
p3@450
256 mb sdram
8 gb pri master
40 gb pri slave ( linux)
32mb riva tnt2 graphics
yamaha ymf 724 sound
pctel internal modem hsp56

The prbolem is
I run KDE with keramik as style, my problem is that the system is very
sluggish. It takes ~ 4-5 secs for a file manager to open. irrespictive of the
GUI or window manager.. the same is true for GNOME also.

If i am playing mp3 from hdd or cdrom even if i click on the window or switch between
windows. the music pauses for a second !

My ram seems to get filled up @ blocks of 8k size as time passes by..and
eventualy i only have some 4mb of free ram left !

the processes i run are postgresql,httpd. occasinaly i use tomcat too.
even if none of these are running i get the same problem.

I am running kernel version 2.4.18-14 on a redhat 8 ..
any suggestions to make it work smooth ?

Try running "top". You can press "M" to sort by memory usage and see what proccess is using the most.

httpd? You're running apache on this server, and want to run KDE and play music/do desktop stuff too?

When I was using a PCTel internal modem with MS Windows before I totally foreswore that product and corporation--I found that the modem could severely tie up my whole computer. When I switched to a hardware modem, no more hangups whatsoever. It's well worth the few extra dollars to have a hardware modem.

And a great confusion came onto the world,
and a man would borrow his brothers hammer,
and the brother wouldn't know, and everything
got confused ....


Cheers,
Tink

I tied the top with M option.. its shows a lot of instances of kdeinit running .. ya i use apache .. its needed for my work ! but the same config works well for win xp ..even though i use it rarely..

My RedHat 8 was also pretty slow on my PIII 1GHz until I compiled my own kernel (2.4.20). Since then it works perfectly.

I am desperate . kde eith keramik is too good to throw away.. and to slugish to work with

Hey guys thers a workaround..dunno whether it will work for all. The villain is imlib .. try installing the imlib version that came with redhat 7.1 & fn lib also ..then at gnome works very fast .. nautilus takes only a fraction of a second to open..with apache & tomcat all running in the bkgnd.. wonder if theers a workaround for kde too ..

btw i tried fluxbox.. how do i get the icons on my Desktop ? does it have filemanager of its own ?

yet another cool one is enlightenment ..it works very fast.. when coupled with gmc ..

256M sdram is not so enough, So what about the swap space?

You should shutoff some services you don't need. Xft , xfree86 , or even mozilla will take many memory. and you even play mp3 . hehe...
maybe you should add some memory