Tim wrote:
On Sun, 2008-02-03 at 21:57 -0500, Doug Purdy wrote:
Since before Dec 25 both my FC2 and my F7 computers have been running
super slow. Both machines also have XT and that ran fine in informal
tests this weekend, that is, XT responded well and exhibited no
slowness or crashes.
"XT"?
If it weren't two computers, cooling would have been the first thing to
spring to mind (it could still be, if you're in a hot environment).
Things like fans and heatsinks gunked up with fluff stops them working
right, and some systems will slow the CPU down to stop it burning out.
The other thing that springs to mind with two computers, is whether
you've been compromised. You could check for a rootkit, but this is
just a wild stab in the dark.
Taking minutes to finish booting could also point the finger at name
resolution not working, if you have services that need to know their
network addresses.
Another thing to look at is memory. On systems with 256MB or less,
applications will get totally paged out over night during cron activity.
When these applications attempt to run the next day, they can take
minutes to page back in, depending upon HD speeds and application size.
Rebooting appears to solve the problem only because there is nothing
cached in memory and the system can load new things without having to
reorganize physical memory.
XP will not show the same symptoms on these systems because it does not
run the same level of disk heavy cron jobs (logwatch, updatedb,
makewhatis, and prelink).
XP also does not have a very robust paging system and can simply fail
applications when physical memory is exceeded.
All I am suggesting, is that there is a good reason that the Fedora
developers have moved the recommended memory requirement to 512MB.
Fedora, and many other Linux distros can be made to run in 128MB or even
less, but you have to know what you are doing, and limit what you use it
for.
In general, memory helps all UNIX/Linux based systems. The more memory
the better, and 2GB desktop systems are becoming common place.
Good Luck!
