The memory problem
 

I am running Mandrake Linux 10.0 version on Intel Celoron Processor; it is Pentimum III.
I have 256 SDRAM in memory and the graphic card is NVIDIA with 64 memory.

Is the memory too little to run Linux? I am noticing some tardy nature when loading the Open Office Word processor.

Your comments, please.

I have some plans to upgrade to Mandriva 10.2. It may not be a good idea as I have so little memory.
I would like to hear from you all.

256 Mb should be alright. I mean its not a lot, but it depends on what you do with it. Open Office is kind of a big application. But it should be alright.

If its really slow, what I would suspect is your desktop manager. Check what it is starting when you boot the machine. If there are lots of deamons that you dont use that are running, they will use up your ram for no reason. What is it? Gnome, KDE, etc??

How slow is it? If you mean its now opening as soon as you click the icon, thats normal. But once its started, you should not have any problem.

Finally, PC133 SDRAM has really gone down a lot. If you are planning on keeping that machine for sometime, it could be a really good idea to invest in a little more memory. You will really see a difference in the performance of the machine.

You won't notice any slowdown between Mandrake 10 and Mandriva 10.2. If OpenOffice is too slow for you, there are alternatives such as AbiWord or KOffice which I believe is a bit lighter than OpenOffice.

I had 768 memory on my previous computer. When I clicked the Open Office, it startd very quickly.

Now when I click, it is struggling to come on to the screen. Of course, I have always the Firefox browser working with 3 or 4 web sites.

How do I find out daemons? I don't want them.

Be carefull about statements like that. You should not deactivate deamons unless you know you dont need them. There are some that you will need no matter what.

You can know what is running on your machine by typing ps -a. You'll see a list of all active process (programs). You can post these here and we'll give you pointers at which ones you mignt deactivate.

Generally speaking, deamons are started from the rc scripts (/etc/init.d or /etc/rc.3 or someothers) It depends on the distro. I dont use Mandrake, so I dont know where they put their init scripts.

Lets give you an example:
rc.3 contains deamons runnig at runlevel 3 (type runlevel to know your current runlevel). You can remove some of them if they are useless. The RC folders actually contains links. They point to the scipt in the init.d folder. NEVER remove the init.d scripts, just remove the link to them in the rc folders.


BTW, I know there are graphical tools to manage these, but I never used them. If you want to do this graphically (usally is easier for someone starting), google about something like "deamon management linux graphical".

Hope this helps

Thanks BoldKiller

Here is the output:
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------
[nissanka@c83-250-90-204 nissanka]$ ps -a
PID TTY TIME CMD
17744 pts0 00:00:00 ps
[nissanka@c83-250-90-204 nissanka]$
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Are there any programs to kill? Now I have opened 4 webpages using Firefox. I tried to open GIMP. The web browsers collapsed. This is a problem of memory. I destroyed the downloading of Mandriva ISO files when the browser collapsed

GIMP is like the Photoshop program in Windows. I don't want to open GIMP again.

Now I have open the shell to write or practice some script langage plus 4 web pages.



Please tell me what to do now.

oups, sorry, its ps -A.
A is in capital letter. My mistake

well, it always depend on what you want to do.

xinetd is not necessary unless you want to run some kind of server.

You seem to have a lot kdeinit. Its normal to have more than one. But There really seems to be a lot. Someone who uses KDE should confirm that.

XFS: is your file system xfs or ext3? Is its ext3, you dnot need XFS. (type mount, to know the filesystem type).

Those are the one I saw in a quick scan. You should try to google for some of them to know what they do and if your really need them.

BTW, You could check memory usage. Check /proc/meminfo. You will see ram usage and swap usage. free memory is rather small, then you will be sure its really a memory problem. You can then investigate your deamon and figure out those you should disable. Otherwise, it could be something else.

Thanks for the reply.

How do I find ram usage in proc. The following is the output.

[nissanka@c83-250-90-204 nissanka]$ ls /proc
1/ 1746/ 17852/ 2140/ 2421/ 2577/ 4/ cmdline execdomains kallsyms mounts@ swaps
11/ 17582/ 17871/ 2141/ 2422/ 2586/ 5/ config.gz fb kcore mtrr sys/
1426/ 17593/ 1808/ 2142/ 2431/ 2587/ 6/ cpufreq filesystems kmsg net/ sysrq-trigger
1495/ 17598/ 1813/ 2318/ 2470/ 2590/ 7/ cpuinfo fs/ loadavg partitions sysvipc/
1539/ 1762/ 2/ 2396/ 248/ 2596/ 8/ crypto ide/ locks pci tty/
1553/ 17674/ 2039/ 2412/ 2562/ 2631/ 9/ devices interrupts mdstat scsi/ uptime
1561/ 17675/ 2137/ 2413/ 2566/ 2636/ apm diskstats iomem meminfo self@ version
158/ 1770/ 2138/ 2416/ 2568/ 2761/ buddyinfo dma ioports misc slabinfo vmstat
1694/ 1781/ 2139/ 2418/ 2570/ 3/ bus/ driver/ irq/ modules stat


How do I shutdown xinetd? I don't have a server.

type "cat /proc/meminfo" its going to display the content of the /proc/meminfo file. This file is maintain by the OS. It is used to display the amount of memory used.

As for Xinietd, there is a link someplace that is starting it. I assume you are in runlevel 3 or 4. Than, it is most likely in /etc/rc.4. Or something similar. (it really changes from one distro to the other, I'm a debian user, so I dont know where exactly mandrake stores it). Anyway, just find the link and delete it.

The rc.4 folder contains a bunch of links. Those are all the programs that linux is going to start when going in runlevel 4. There is also a /etc/rc.3 for the programs started in runlevel 3. (there actually is an rc folder for every runlevel. usally 1 to 5).

Thanks BoldKiller

What information you get by reading the following.? I have no clue as to the free memory or how it uses the memory.


[nissanka@c83-250-90-204 nissanka]$ cat /proc/meminfo
MemTotal: 125304 kB
MemFree: 1252 kB
Buffers: 560 kB
Cached: 25320 kB
SwapCached: 0 kB
Active: 110644 kB
Inactive: 2404 kB
HighTotal: 0 kB
HighFree: 0 kB
LowTotal: 125304 kB
LowFree: 1252 kB
SwapTotal: 0 kB
SwapFree: 0 kB
Dirty: 96 kB
Writeback: 0 kB
Mapped: 102732 kB
Slab: 6872 kB
Committed_AS: 157196 kB
PageTables: 1180 kB
VmallocTotal: 909236 kB
VmallocUsed: 2784 kB
VmallocChunk: 906044 kB
[nissanka@c83-250-90-204 nissanka]$

Well, that means that the thing has 128MB, not 256, and
that you don't have swapping enabled.

The "collapsing" of the browser means that the kernel
will randomly kill some application when it can't allocate
memory for your next thing to open.


Cheers,
Tink

Thanks Tinkster


I bought this second hand computer. It has a 256 module. I am upset to learn this 128 memory.
How do I enable the swap file?

Looks like you don't have a swap partition or file, this could cause problems of you try to open too many programs at once. At the minute just under half of your memory is currently being used by processes

Nevermind, looks like I was beaten too it. Thats what you get for watching TV whilst browsing LQ I suppose

Well the normal thing to do is create a swap partition during installation. But if you don't want to reinstall or you don't have any unpartitioned space on your hard drive then you could create a swap file. If you click on the link below and scroll down to the part about the swap file

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...ap-adding.html

A word of caution: In step 5, add that line below the line for the partition that is going to contain the file.

If the computer has a single memory module check if there is a part number on it. You should make sure it is acually a 128Mb module. If it is 256mb but the board reports it as 128, it means your module is bad. You should change it as soon as possible. Bad memory will always leed to hard to track problems! The same think is true if you have 2x128mb. It means one of the module (or the socket in which the module is) is bad.

As for swap space, you need to create a swap partion on your hard disk. Similar to the partitions you created to install Linux. If you dont have any space left on the disk you will need to resize (if this is still a new install, reformatting and starting over might be simpler for you).

To create the partion, you will use fdisk (like "fdisk /dev/hda" if you want to have swap on the 1rst disk).
To format the partion you will use mkswap (like "mkswap /dev/hda2", /dev/hda2 being the partion you created with fdisk)
Then you will need to add a line in your /etc/fstab to tell the OS that you have a swap partition. It will look similar to this:
Where /dev/hda2 will have to actually be the disk partion you created.

You should try to google for swap partition. There are a lot of good step by step how-to out there to enable a swap partition.

Mandrake Control Centre->System->Services will show you all the daemons (services) and allow you to stop/start and disable/enable them. This GUI is a frontend for the chkconfig and service commands which in turn manipulate the scripts in init.d and rc.X that BoldKiller was talking about in an earlier post.

In my experience, the root cause of the problem is usually not a shortage of RAM, but a seriously under-performing disk I/O subsystem. Many computers use the built-in, "convenient" IDE-type controllers that are built in to the motherboard ... but these can be ridiculously slow.

Consider purchasing a separate disk-controller card, and using this instead of what's built onto the main board. The difference in speed can be considerable.

Also consider using more sophisticated technologies such as FireWire and SCSI, which support much higher transfer-rates and extensive parallelism. Once again the secret is in a ~$100 card.

The disk transfer parameters (hdparm) that are used by your system at startup are often conservative... and therfore slow. Simple "tuning" of the system can have very impressive results.