> Hi list, > Once again my FC4 box (Duron 1200mHz, 512 ram) has crawled to a halt. > I quickly top'ed and found a process prelink that varied between > 74%-98% CPU usage. > > PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND > 5202 root 39 19 11724 9280 536 R 89.9 1.9 0:23.59 prelink > > So I googled for prelink and now know that it helps preload libraries > so that progreams can start faster. Which is senseable because the > machine started slowing down when I clicked 'manage bookmarks' in > firefox, which opens another program. My question is, what can I do to > prevent this from happening again? Do I have to ust cross my fingers > every time I open a new program? > > Could this be related to the fact that I have no swap partition? I > know that I should probably add one, I guess that I've just been too > lazy to learn how. Will adding a swap partition make the machine less > sluggish? For this 512 ram machine, I was thinking of adding a 2 gig > swap partition. I had reported on a similar problem, and finally paid attention to the output of "df" which showed 0 usage of swap. In fact, total was 0 too, i.e. i had no swap despite that it was installed with swap. Turned out the /etc/fstab file had a rather curious line in it: LABEL= swap swap defaults 0 0 where the = sign was followed by 15 0xAA characters (that dind't print in the cut&paste above)!! So, no wonder. I suspect it is something in the installed that is broken, since i install redhat systems fairly regularly, or i overlooked a new(?) requirement that partitions be labeled. Anyways, after hardcoding /dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0 and running 'swapon' i'm back in business. e2label and making a nice label of course also would do the job. I only have 640MB on this laptop, so i guess a swap is pretty important, although you don't often run into this problem and it can take weeks before you figured it out. peter
