I installed suse pro and i managed to absolutely kill the drive doing package upgrades. beyond fsck repairs.

I decided to throw fedora RC3 on it instead. I have already set up everything and run KDE (didn't even install gnome). however I noticed that everything runs extremely slow. I've surfed around and seen some issues but was hoping someone may have more input.

Specs:

Toshiba satelite Pro 6100
2.4 Ghz Intel pentium IV
1.0 GB of ram
40 GB HD
nvidia geForce 4 go card


With no apps running the memory sits at about 980MB in use while swap is at 0.

I shutdown Apache, lisa, mail, and all other servers/services I do not need. I have hard time believing that firefox or even Konquerer should take 30-40 seconds to pop up on this box.

I'm looking for real insight, i'd prefer not to install gnome and convert everything over then remove KDE. Signed Frustrated and wishing he was still on Suse.

P.S. the reason i don't just witch back to Suse is that i have spent 2 days at work getting everything going and my boss will kill me.

uhh, i can confirm that your situation is abnormal. can't think of any obvious fixes though...try using ps and top to find out which programs are using the memory...look through dmesg for anything suspicious. out of curiosity, what were you using to monitor memory usage?

When i go pabck in tommorow i will post a snapshot of my top screen, it seems that top doesn't list anything thats eye catching to me. i guess teh obvious answer will be to load gnome and switch to it to see if the issue still exists. if so suse hear i come and a huge lecture as well

Its hard when your trying to set a precedent in your company and these things backfire. Any suggestions or log/file requests i will be most happy to oblige

don't forget that in top shift+> (maybe <, i can't remember) will sort by %mem. and a screenshot would be nice, i'd like to know how much memory top thinks is being used. i looked around /var/log/ but i couldn't find anything that i would understand well enough to help diagnose. as for trying gnome, i think that's a good idea. try as many different things as possible, try switching to runlevel 3, or even level 1. try running something like fluxbox. see if you can narrow down the circumstances. if all memory is being used across the board, then i'd say just reinstall. but if it only happens with X, or KDE or something, maybe we can figure it out.

I switched to Gnome and all seems to be well. hovers around 200MB of memory use, programs are faster and the world is good. I do notice that for the life of me i can't figure out Samba as it sees my networks bt keeps telling me i am unauthorized to get to them... but that is for a different forum.

the issue with KDE was this:

Upon login memory hovered around 20%
After opening any gui based application, the meemory peaks (varies per application. At the closure of that application the memory stays wher it is. If i open another app the same thing happens memory increases then decreases. Instead of digging deeper i just gave up and went to Gnome... Dissapointing solution but a solution none the less.

well, i'm glad you found a solution, even if it's not quite what you were looking for. i stick to as minimal an install as i can, running slackware, fluxbox, and spending almost all my time in a terminal...so i've never run into any real memory problems. just as a comment, when i've got a few basic things open in fluxbox like a couple aterms, an emacs window, firefox and maybe xmms, it takes about 128/768 of my RAM.


here's a screenshot of top while those are all running.