Dear all

I recently installed Slackware 10.2 on a Win98SE dual boot box and am running KDE. However, the system is really slow - far slower than when I had the same box up and running Slackware 10.0. I have 790MB SWAP and 250MB of RAM. When I checked, even though the only app I had open was kinfo there was 76% of the memory taken up with application data.
The output was: 74% free swap
6.6 MB free physical
57% total free memory

The system is really slow though - screen repainting is slow, apps opening are slow and then when I open OO.o2.02. the system just about hangs entirely.

Any suggestions aside from changing the DE?

Cheers

try making the swap file smaller - say 500MB tops..
does it look like the system is paging heaps of stuff? i recently built a laptop that has 256MB ram and 450MB swap space and when it boots and loads KDE it as well allocates 100MB of RAM to disk cache and some 85MB to system..
the machine runs very well though...

this machine is running slackware 10.1 however.
did you compile the kernel yourself or use one of the stable ones that came with slack? If you made your own check the settings for system latency and memmory - make sure all are configured for 'desktop' with low latency. and <4GB RAM.

Hi - I'm using the vanilla 2.4.* slackware 10.2 kernel. By adjusting the swap space, won't that require a fresh install or using something like a partition magic app? I was always under the impression that a large swap was a good thing? Why would reducing the swap size speed up the machine? That seems almost counter-intuitive.

Thanks

One thing that strike me is the comment that screen repainting is slow. Have you checked your xorg.conf to make sure the video is set up correctly?

you can resize your swap and you will not have to reinstall I did it. but you do have to resize the actual partition itself so be sure you backup your data, becuase if you have windows on there, and you have a bad partition table, or master boot record you could be messed up really bad - I know this from years of experience with windows pc's and partitions. my suggestion, partition magic from powerquest I like it better than cfdisk becuase it will do a drive integrity check for you.

also, in your xorg log is your system running on high memory mode as your swap is so big. i had that happen to me when I was first moving to linux and tried out suse.

i agree you need to check out your video settings.

also I have a buddy with a p66 laptop gateway and 160 mb ram, we loaded slackware on it and it really flies. he uses XFCE desktop, with opera web-browswer. he can surf, play cd's at same time. i really think something is not being identified right too maybe hardware wise.

your swap file is really only supposed to be 2 x your installed ram.

Yes please read what old_fogie says re the resize - thats a good point re the slow refresh of the screen though - i overlooked that...
And no, the biger the swap file is not necessarily better... It should always be relative to your actual physical ram. Generally i find just under double the size of physical RAM works well (although there is a recomended amount).
The swap file is a LOT slower than actual ram so if you have a huge swap and your machine is paging everything then it could suffer in response time and you would also have a hard drive that was thrashing a lot..

Thanks fellas - you have given me some good leads to work with. The other interesting thing I found was that I had two instances of OO.o-2.0.2 running (must have double clicked something), and once I shut one down, the system seemed to have picked up some juice again. I'll see how this works out, but will probably work to resize the swap in due course when I have a bit more time to fiddle.

Thanks all

Oh ok goodo
there is a setting in open office in regards to how much RAM it requests.. Maybe worth checking this as well. I would think that 10MB will suffice.
If u dont have a linuxboot cd download one with system tools included. I use 'System Rescue cd' which is very good @ 130Mb d/l it comes with a few tools that will resize partitions.
see :
i would think you could delete/create in fdisk of cfdisk and go from there....