Les wrote: > Ladies and gentlemen... > I have 104 processes listed when I run the monitor. My system is > slowing to a crawl, dropping internet connections and jerking like it > has epilepsy. Would someone please tell me how many process should be > running in a simple workstation setup (not a server). > > Or better yet post a list. Obviously I am not going to post a list, but I can say that I now have 140+ processes. There is really no "normal" for this, since different environments will spawn different number of processes. You seem to be under impression that all 104 processes eat away at your system resources, where it is not really that way. Most of the processes spend most of their time "sleeping". What you are interested in are the following things: 1. Load average (to find out use "uptime" command). This is more or less "how many processes want to run on my system at the same time". So it your load average gets more then number of processoros on your system plus one you will start seeing slowdowns. 2. Memory and swapping (to find out use "free" command). Check if your swap is actively used, if it is you might consider getting more RAM. Never mind that the actual free memory is almost zero, linux uses memory very efficiently, so it never lets it sit unused. Check what percentage of memory is used for cache if it is too small, you might want to consider getting more RAM. 3. Use top to see if there are runaway processes. People reported problems with beagle indexer, firefox and thunderbird and some other applications starting to eat all the memory and/or CPU under some circumstances. If that is the case you might just have to kill the offending process.
