On Mon, 22 Dec 2003 16:15:45 -0800 "Calderon, Jay" <jcaldero@xxxxxxxxxx> wrote: > 16:07:40 up 13 min, 2 users, load average: 3.49, 1.88, 1.04 > 59 processes: 58 sleeping, 1 running, 0 zombie, 0 stopped > CPU states: cpu user nice system irq softirq iowait idle > total 5.1% 0.0% 2.8% 1.2% 0.0% 90.8% 0.0% > Mem: 124768k av, 120452k used, 4316k free, 0k shrd, 2992k buff > 34340k active, 5724k inactive > Swap: 262072k av, 82868k used, 179204k free 11532k cached > > PID USER PRI NI SIZE RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEMTIME CPU CMD > 1174 root 5 0 88292 2820 74040 S 3.0 2.2 :15 0 X > 1816 jcaldero 15 0 24380 3992 19300 S 2.5 3.1 0:04 0 gnome-terminal > 1863 jcaldero 17 0 5060 604 3948 R 0.4 0.4 0:02 0 top Jay, Your system looks to be low on memory and is swapping. Not sure what the relevant difference is in comparison to 2.4. A "top" of a similar workload under 2.4 would be instructive. If you press capital letter 'M' when in top you'll see a list of processes sorted by memory usage which might help find a culprit. Capturing the output of a "vmstat 1" command while observing slow response in one of your applications would prove if swapping is the issue for sure. Looking through "dmesg" output you may see some relevant information. As well,"slabtop" will show you some of the memory demands of the kernel itself. Finally, you could play with setting the value of /proc/sys/vm/swappiness. It's 60 by default and basically controls whether the kernel prefers memory usage by application or cache data. In your situation i would guess that lowering this value might help. However, i've heard conflicting results so i'd suggest playing around with different settings (0-100). An interesting first try would be: echo 10 > /proc/sys/vm/swappiness Incidentally, you're not the first person to report problems with 2.6 using <= 128Mb of RAM. Unfortunately, nothing may help as much as another stick of RAM. Good luck, Sean
