Too Much Ram!!! need help
 

Ok guys heres a newb ? for ya!

I tried installing several distros of Linux on my laptop:

FC1,2, and 3
Mandrake 10.1
Suse 9.2

All with the same problem: ultra slow!!!!
Mandrake and Suse 1 hour to boot!!!
Fedora was better at between 10-20 minutes but any time I tried updateing anything or installing new kernels the whole install got f'd up in one way or another.

With Suse 9.2 installed someone told me to remove 1 stick of ram, from 1 gig to 512, with no other modification it booted in less than 1.5 minutes!!!!!

I tried search here but could not search well enough to find a relevant thread. Can someone please point me to a resource that will help me use all of my ram!
and fix this problem. thx

it might be a swap problem .. if the swap space and RAM are not aligned right, i hear things get SLOW ... i hear its supposed to be about 2X more swap space then RAM

You can download memtest86+ and burn it to a floppy or cd and boot off that and let it test the memory and see if it finds any problems. Some of the test can take a while.

If you still have FC3 installed. Check in your /boot for memtest+-v1.26 If it is there then you can add it to your /boot/grub/grub.conf and boot that up. Here Is a sample of my grub.conf

I have a newer version installed but the one on default install should work fine. I mostly use this tool to run down the battery once a month.

Brian1
" Google the Linux way @ http://www.google.com/linux "

What about HiMem in the kernel? I had to activate it to get the full gig to read in my system.

there is nothing wrong with tthe ram.

Its something to do with linux.
The fact that someone suggested to remove the ram and it fixed my problem means someone knows wtf is going on here.

So you have probed and traced both sticks, temp tested and fill/flushed each single block to verify this?
If not, never assume the hardware is OK. But I'll agree in this case there is another reason.

The problem is that you only have support for 960 megabytes of physical RAM enabled in your kernel.
Recompile your kernel with himem support or look for a pre-compiled kernel package from your distro that supports it.

thankyou

I've never heard of having more than the supported amount of ram having adverse effects on a system.
For a while, I was running with 1 gig ram, but without himem support. Nothing slower, the machine just used only 960 of the available 1024.

I'm not sure this is the correct issue. I'd still be more prone to suspect hardware than software. Both sticks are of the same maker and speed?

--Shade

I'm with Shade - sounds significantly suspect to me.

My ram is a matched set of High Performance/low latency-

After simply removing 1 stick of ram all speed problems have been solved, I mean it -no other modification was done!
All distros boot in under 2 minutes now!

I went into the "make menuconfig" for both kernels I have in FC3 .
Both have the himem 4GB option selected already, so I dont know what else to do????

You need to do some basic diagnostics.
Do both sticks (separately) work o.k. ???.
Is there a motherboard restriction on which slots the sticks must be installed in ???.

Have you run memtest as suggested above - with both sticks in.
What does dmesg show during/after one of your slow sessions ???.
Likewise /var/logs.

Personally I'm not surprised the highmem changes didn't result in any change.

My 2 cents -- I agree with Shade and syg00. It's good that both sticks are identical, but if system performance goes down the drain when both are installed, my top 2 guesses would be:

1. One of the sticks is bad. If your system boots in a normal amount of time with stick "A", try seeing what happens when you remove "A" and replace it with "B". If performance is poor, then stick "B" is defective. Replace it.

2. One of your RAM slots is defective. If both "A" and "B" work correctly in slot 0, but anytime slot 0 and slot 1 are occupied the performance degrades, then your mobo is defective.

As a secondary test, and as already suggested, definitely run memtest on each stick separately (since your PC is having problems when both sticks are installed). If one of the sticks fails, then you can clearly blame that stick as the cause. If both sticks pass, but the system basically doesn't boot when both are installed, personally I'd conclude that the mobo has a problem of some sort.

In any event, that's how I'd approach the issue; others may have other/better suggestions. Good luck with it either way -- J.W.

Cmon guys how many times do I have to tell you THIS IS NOT A HARDWARE PROBLEM!!!!!

The ram and motherboard are fine! Read b4 you post please.

I didnt change the himem settings, they where already set to 4gig on both kernels, so nothing was changed.

Yes, you are of course correct.
It couldn't possible be your motherboard or RAM, it MUST be Linux - an extremely stable OS that has worked for me and countless others for years exactly they way we wanted it to.

I understand your frustration, but there is no need to be rude. We are reading your posts, and nothing in them states that you have done anything to rule out a problem with the RAM or motherboard. If you have run memtest and done as J.W. suggested, then please let us know so that we can provide better insight.

The people on this board are more than happy to help you, but we need to know what you have done to rule out a hardware problem, rather that you just 'shouting' at us that it is not hardware. None of us provide help for profit, or even any kind of personal benefit. We provide help out of a sense of community and shared experience. GNU/Linux is a community, and you enter that community when asking it for help. Please have some respect.

As to your problem, I also believe it may be the RAM. The fact that somebody told you to remove a stick of RAM and it fixed the problem doesn't indicate that it is an OS problem. It indicates, IMHO, that whoever suggested this course of action has suffered from a bad stick of RAM before, and suggested you start taking sticks out.