Monday 04/02/2008 at 14:05, Phil Meyer wrote: > 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"? Boy, what a mistake! I should have typed XP. > > 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 Fedora 7 computer is now clean and the casing is off. The power supply exhaust is noticeably cooler. The Fedora Core 2 computer is still running fine. > > 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. This sounds tougher to check so I'll do the easy verifications first. > > 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. Tim, the FC2 computer is just a normal desktop install and it's not providing nor using shared directories or databases. There are only 8 computers and a network printer on this home LAN. See below, cpu cycles and memory appear to be being gobbled up somewhere. > > > > 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! Thanks Phil! Memory does seem to be the problem on the 1.2gig Fedora 7 computer. With System Monitor the only application running, memory usage climbs continuously at about 10 megs a minute. It's now into the swap file for 230 megs. CPU usage is about 25% even though System monitor is only using 2-6%. The 760 meg Fedora Core 2 computer is still acting normally and reporting memory and CPU usage in agreement with the processes reported by System Monitor. How do I investigate what invisible process is using the CPU and memory? Doug
