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Old 11-19-2004, 01:53 AM   #1
Mufasa
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no procs running but all RAM is used?


Hello,

I have 190M of ram on a HP laptop. Installed with Suse 9.1 Linux. When starting the system with only *one* Xterm up and running, I get the following from "top"

Mem: 191112k total, 188272 used, 2720k free, 6820k buffers
Swap: 1048816k total, 130784k used, 918040k free, 99240k cached

The system runs terribly slow The Netbeans (4.0) is miserable. I have started Oracle (10g) - I see all of the processes needed for Oracle to run but I fear that that will be slow too since most of the memory is being hogged by the OS.

What is the problem? Can this be fixed?

TIA

Last edited by Mufasa; 11-19-2004 at 01:59 AM.
 
Old 11-19-2004, 02:15 AM   #2
Mega Man X
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What processor do you have in that laptop? Also, which windows/Desktop manager are you running? KDE? Gnome?. And one last question: When you run "top", which program is taking so much memory?. Try using a lighter windows managers as black/fluxbox or XFCE. I know blackbox is shipped with SuSE. They really make the difference.

And a side note... Netbeans always runs choppy, even in my 2GHZ, mind you. If you don't need any of the "fancy" features to create gui's using AWT/Swing and stuff, you might want to check out Eclipse or even Dr.Java IDE's.

Last edited by Mega Man X; 11-19-2004 at 02:17 AM.
 
Old 11-19-2004, 02:22 AM   #3
whansard
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use a low resource desktop, like anything but kde and gnome. fluxbox or blackbox for example.
 
Old 11-19-2004, 02:49 AM   #4
Mufasa
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Hello there,

Thanks for responding

The desktop I am using is under Suse 9.1 - it is KDE. Does it really take up that much memory? I have about 190MB - is that a small amount for nowadays?

When I run "top", the first 30 procesess take < 1% of memory. I am looking under the % MEM column. The first one that seems totake up 1.3% of the memory is a process called "httpd2-prefork".

Is there a way I can capture the results of "top" and put them in this thread?

It seems that these processes are not taking up memory but at the same time, I get the values that I mentioned when openeing this thread.

I had at first wondered if Linux was just taking up too much memory - even when it did not have to do so. Is there a way to configure Linux so it does not use so much memory? I have 1G of swap space.

TIA once more

Last edited by Mufasa; 11-19-2004 at 02:54 AM.
 
Old 11-19-2004, 02:55 AM   #5
Mega Man X
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It could be KDE. At least, I remember running out of memory (I've 256MB only in my main computer with a Pentium IV - 2GHZ) with SuSE 9.1 once when running mplayer and KDE. It turns out to be a memory leak somewhere that I can't remember where... But give Blackbox a shot. You will simply love it after a while and wonder why you were running such a heavy Desktop before. Fluxbox is also awesome and very similar, yet, different. I prefer Flux...

Another way to speed up things is running YaST2 and going into "runlevel" editor. There you will be able to edit all the programs that start automatically during boot time. Some, as ssh daemon (used to access a computer in a network remotely) is turned on by default and many don't use it (I do though)

Using that carefully will certainly increase your amount of free memory and give you a faster boot time.

And 190MB is ok for today, not good though, but it all depends what you want to run. KDE is heavy for 190MB in my humble opinion, but this is just a guess

Last edited by Mega Man X; 11-19-2004 at 02:57 AM.
 
Old 11-19-2004, 04:29 AM   #6
Mufasa
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Hi Megaman,

Thank you again for your help

I had started to get used to KDE - it seemed to make things more Windows like (especially when it came to the configurations through Yast). It was so easy to configure the printer for example. The last time I used Linux, I had to follow this HOW-TO manual and it took days. It even has a word processor that seems like Windows.

Will I be able to do such things with a different desktop (for example, configuring devices from a Control Window - like in Windows)?

TIA once more.
 
Old 11-19-2004, 05:21 AM   #7
Mega Man X
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No problems Mufasa . Well, you can run, theoretically, every program made for KDE and Gnome from Flux/Blackbox. There should be no problem with YaST2 either .

And I agree with you, YaST2 really does make life easier and it's the best configuration tool out there in my honest opinion(at least for the distributions I've tried), followed closely(but not much) by Mandrake's Control Center. Sometimes, somethings, just has to be done easier...

So basically, whatever you now run with KDE, you can run with Blackbox/Fluxbox. The main difference is that KDE is a Desktop Environment (which provides tools for customizing itself, text editor as kedit, calculator... you know, those little things you most likely never use ) while a Windows Manager as Fluxbox, does not provide those little things and has less eye kind (but can be customized to look gorgeous, mind you).

You can read more about Desktop Environments and Windows Managers here:

http://www.redhat.com/docs/manuals/l...x-clients.html

You can check some screenshots of fluxbox here:

http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/screenshots-dev.php

You gona love some of those. Also check this:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...threadid=26643

To see some of this forum members desktops. Some are just awesome. Plus, it's worth the shot to get more from your PC without sacrificing performance with a heavy environment as KDE .

Good luck!
 
Old 11-19-2004, 01:32 PM   #8
whansard
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there are a few tools for blackbox and fluxbox that add the kde and gnome menu's to the blackbox or fluxbox menu. that way things can still be sort of where they were before. try the blackbox home page.
 
  


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