Hi folks, I use a 2.6.22-gentoo-r2 SMP kernel with fglrx 8.40.4 [1], tp_smapi-0.32 and ipw3945-1.2.0 on a Thinkpad T60 with dual core Intel Core CPU. My root filesystem is XFS stored on an internal SATA disk, and I have 1GB of RAM and no swap. After several suspend to RAM/resume cycles, the X interface got pretty slow today. Looking at the top output, I see that one core was completely busy in the "wa" state and according to `ps auxww`, the kswapd0 process was in uninterruptable deep sleep. I don't use any swap because my applications rarely need more memory than I have in my system and using 1GB of swap yielded poor performance when it was actually accessed. I know I can tweak VM's preferences, but I simply don't feel the need to use swap when I have "plenty" of memory. That said, I've googled a thread [2] which recommends using at least a small swap because VM somehow performs better with it. So I created a small (12MB) swap on a physical partition on the same SATA disk and swapon-ed it. The swap got full immediately but the load didn't get lower. After that, I've turned it off again, adjusted its size to be about 1GB and enabled it again. Several tens of seconds later, swap usage was at approximately 350MB and RAM usage at about 60MB. There was no unusual activity at the background (no intensive cronned jobs, no locate, nothing, just an idle KDE session with bunch of idling applications). Touching the swappiness value (0, 10, 40, 60 and 100) didn't change anything on the fact that switching from one application to another was slow, and even moving a mouse cursor (USB-attached mouse) in X was delayed and not smooth. Could you please provide a hint about what might cause such problems, what am I doing wrong and how can I avoid it? If there are any details like kernel config that are relevant here, I'll happily provide them. I'd also appreciate if you keep me on the CC as I'm not subscribed to this list. If this is not an appropriate place to ask, please accept my apologies. [1] I'm aware of the fact that fglrx is a binary closed source and that the kernel is tainted by its usage. Unfortunately no other driver besides VESA supports my VGA card. [2] http://www.redhat.com/archives/nahant-list/2006-March/msg00033.html Cheers, -jkt -- cd /local/pub && more beer > /dev/mouth
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