Slack 12 + Firefox + memory problem

Bruce Hill · 09-29-2008, 05:31 PM

And your swap partition should be showing up with "fdisk -l"

allend · 09-29-2008, 08:45 PM

As this is affecting Seamonkey as well as Firefox, I am wondering whether there is a problem with routing. Perhaps the output from route -n may be informative.
I quite happily surf the web using Firefox on a laptop with 256M of RAM and a 500M swap and the swap space is not used to any significant extent.

raypen · 09-29-2008, 11:27 PM

Swap is usually configured automatically as part of the installation process.
I don't usually give it a second thought but you have pointed out that it is
probably not enabled.

I do recall from previous Slack versions that the swapon command usually appeared
in dmesg. It doesn't in my Slack 12.0. A swap entry also doesn't appear in fstab.

fdisk -l produces:

Code:

Disk /dev/hda: 40.0 GB, 40000000000 bytes
255 heads, 63 sectors/track, 4863 cylinders
Units = cylinders of 16065 * 512 = 8225280 bytes

   Device Boot      Start         End      Blocks   Id  System
/dev/hda1   *           1        1279    10273536    c  W95 FAT32 (LBA)
/dev/hda2            1280        1380      811282+  82  Linux swap
/dev/hda3            1381        4008    21109410   83  Linux

So I added the following to fstab:

Code:

/dev/hda2        swap             swap        defaults         0   0

Rebooted but still did not see swap activated in dmesg.

cat /etc/mtab produces:

Code:

/dev/hda3 / ext3 rw 0 0
proc /proc proc rw 0 0
sysfs /sys sysfs rw 0 0
usbfs /proc/bus/usb usbfs rw 0 0
/dev/hda1 /fat32 vfat rw 0 0

and cat /proc/swaps produces:

Code:

Filename                                Type            Size    Used    Priority
/dev/hda2                               partition       811272  0       -1

It seems to me that somewhere in rc.M there used to be an entry to enable swap but
I don't see that anymore. I just assumed that maybe HAL or UDEV somehow magically
enabled it in Slack 12.0.

I tried mkswap /dev/hda2 and swapon -a on the running system but don't know if it
is truly enabled since it still does not appear in /etc/mtab.

Is this enough information?

H_TeXMeX_H · 09-30-2008, 12:43 AM

The swap partition doesn't seem to show up in my mtab either. However try running this:

Code:

bash-3.1$ dmesg | grep swap
Adding 1992052k swap on /dev/sda2.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:1992052k

If it says that, then you're good.

raypen · 09-30-2008, 09:04 AM

While I was playing around last night, the "swapon" entry
did not appear in dmesg but swap appeared to be working
correctly as I was able to load the heavy graphics web page
with no hang. Also cat /proc/swaps also indicated usage of
approximately 40000 something.

Booted up this morning and dmesg | grep swap produced this:

Code:

Adding 811272k swap on /dev/hda2.  Priority:-1 extents:1 across:811272k

Do you know how swap is turned on in Slack 12.0? Is it udev or HAL,
because I don't see any entry in any of the rc.d startup files?

Many thanks for your help!

keefaz · 09-30-2008, 09:16 AM

See line #106 of /etc/rc.d/rc.S script

raypen · 09-30-2008, 11:14 AM

Thanks! I thought rc.S was single user mode. I keep forgetting that
Slackware is different.

H_TeXMeX_H · 09-30-2008, 11:31 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by raypen

Thanks! I thought rc.S was single user mode. I keep forgetting that
Slackware is different.

You thought right, rc.S is for single user mode. But it's always run. It goes first to single user mode, then to multi user mode.

AlphaSigmaOne · 09-30-2008, 11:51 AM

I just installed 3.0 and used Pat's package. I've noticed it takes a long time to load--not web pages, but the application itself. I don't think it's a memory problem because I have plenty to spare, but I still wonder if it's a symptom of the same problem?

adriv · 10-01-2008, 04:15 PM

Have you tried a new profile yet?