What is eating my system resources?
 

I've got nothing open except for libreoffice writer and the system monitor and 40 percent of my cpu and 421mb of my ram is being used for... something. I'd really appreciate it if you wizards could help me clean up some of these background processes or tell me what exactly is going on.

I'm also having issues with slow booting.



EDIT:
Wtf... now gnome system monitor is consuming 40% of my cpu and total cpu consumption just jumped to 75%…

is there a lighter version of the system monitor I could be using?

EDIT:
I have 2 instances of apturl-gtk 'sleeping,' each consuming about 30mb of ram and 0 cpu... is this normal?

EDIT:
hmm... gnome screensaver is running (and eating over 3 megs, damn!) even though there is no screensaver active and I've selected for the screensaver never to activate, as I prefer having the display shut off when I walk away. Is there a way to prevent this thing from loading in the future or is that something I don't want to do?

PS: is there a gui method of cutting down on unnecessary boot processes?

PSS: I have linuxmint 11 installed on a flashdrive so any tips y'all might have on making this kind of install more efficient would be well appreciated!

PSSS: I only decided to check out the system monitor because vlc is being really choppy, which it never did when I used it under windows2000 pro.

PSSSS: damn, now firefox is acting sluggish too!


System specs:
os: linuxmint 11 installed to a flash drive
cpu: 2.53ghz p4 northwood
ram: 1gb

For system monitoring in real time, you can use htop or top in a terminal. A neat little graphical one is gkrellm.

As I recall, if you are booting from a thumb drive, you are booting to a ramdisk. The OS creates the ramdisk in memory (which will consume some of your RAM in and of itself) and then loads itself into the ramdisk.

When that is compared to booting from an installed system on a hard drive, it will always come off at a disadvantage.

Conky is good too for system monitoring you can configure it the way you want. Disabling some of the tty may free about 3-4Mb of RAM, and some daemon you do not use as well.

Regards

[QUOTE=frankbell;4546869]As I recall, if you are booting from a thumb drive, you are booting to a ramdisk. The OS creates the ramdisk in memory (which will consume some of your RAM in and of itself) and then loads itself into the ramdisk.
Nope, you wouldn't be able to start a 700MB Live-CD on a system with 512MB RAM if that would be the case. Most live-CDs use a squashfs container and mount an aufs overlay on it. This will take more RAM than an installed system for sure, so that may be the case here.

@zer0nix: You should keep two things in mind:
1. Your system is not only running the programs you can see, like LibreOffice, but also a couple of background programs.
2. Although you call us wizards we are not mindreaders and can't see through you eyes. That means, to recommend anything we need information. For example:
- Is this a "real" installation of Mint or a live-CD copy to a pendrive?
- Which processes are running and taking up the memory and CPU?