Zinn wrote:
> I'm getting some rather poor performance out of a Red Hat 9
> system with PIII 866 Coppermine, and 384 MB PC133 ram. At least
> part of the problem seems to be memory related. First off,
> the applications I'm using are sucking up enormous amounts
> of ram. All the apps I typically keep open are:
> Mozilla
> XEmacs
> Pan
> Evolution
> Gnome-terminal
> Nautilus (kept open by Gnome)
>
> However, each of these is sucking up massive amounts of ram, on
> the order of **dozens of megs** each and I'm typically close to
> exhausting my physical ram. Mozilla alone can often take up 50 - 100
> megs. In addition to the above major apps, Gnome opens lots of little
> things (Gnome-panel, ...) which can take up quite sizeable amounts of
> ram (like 5 - 15 megs each).
>
> Performance is weak, whether it's the memory or something else.
> Switching between processes is slow, even if physical memory is not
> exhausted. Killing some apps improves things a little but doesn't always
> fully restore the system to decent performance.
>
> Further, I have stability problems. My system freezes up about once or
> twice a week or so, probably due to memory exhaustion and thrashing.
>
> By comparison, I have Windows 2000 running on a PII 450 with 512 MB ram.
> Does 128 MB ram make that much difference? It never crashes and it runs
> **faster** on the whole than Red Hat 9 on the PIII 866. Windows 2000
> seems to handle memory exhaustion better than Red Hat. For instance,
> there's a buggy utility program with a memory leak for my wireless card
> on my Windows 2000 box. After runing for a day or so, the program
> consumes nearly all system memory. This doesn't phase Win 2000. The
> system slows down. I get a dialog notifying me that the system is
> increasing virtual memory. If I kill the program, a few seconds later,
> everything's back to normal. Why is it so much cleaner than under Linux?
> The hype I've heard is the opposite.
>
> I don't consider these basic activities I'm doing under Linux anything
> that should be particularly demanding, and I've never seen this kind of
> massive resource consumption for such ordinary tasks on other operating
> systems. Is this normal? Is there some system tweek that might ameliorate
> the problem? Should I upgrade to Fedora?
>
> PS. If you think this is a troll, that's fine. Just deposit your
> comments in /dev/null. On the other hand, if you have something useful
> to say, I'd be interested in any advice.
>
>
>
>

Hmm, you haven't provided enough info for anyone
to give specific recommendations.

By default Linux will cache a lot of data in RAM
to improve performance. When a particular app
needs more RAM Linux will reduce the amount of
RAM used for cache and give the app more RAM.
The idea is to maximize RAM usage (yes, this
is very different from Windows).

Unless you have a 'bad' RAM chip, memory
should not be a problem.

What type of disks (SCSI, IDE, USB, etc)?
What is the file system (reiser, etc)?
How are the disks partitioned?
What are the partition sizes?
How much swap space?
What server daemons are running?
What does the system log say after a "freeze"?
etc, etc, etc....

Provide as much relevant information as possible.

Regards,
Larry
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