Re: Memory Issues

[Bill Guelker <wguelker maverix net>]

On Wed, 20 Dec 2000 09:17:51 "Poletti, Don" wrote:
> I'm having performance problems on my machine and I'm 99%
> sure its due to memory issues. I have 64Megs of Ram. But when
> I run Galeon or Mozilla My machine starts swapping like mad 
> and changing windows talks 5 seconds or more. Using Gtop
> I found that Galeon uses 80megs and Mozilla 0.6 was using
> 130Megs! In both cases that was just to launch and display 
> Google's home page. No wonder my machine was crawling.
> 
> What are my alternatives. I find this very annoying since
> IE does need nearly so much ram so this makes Linux/Gnome
> crawl compared with windows running on the same hardware doing
> similar tasks.
> 
> While I'm on a rant it look likes XMMS takes like 10-15 megs
> Is it just me or does this seem way excessive.
> 
> This will effectively keep me from using Linux/Gnome since
> it less than half the speed of windows on my machine.
> 
> 
> _______________________________________________
> gnome-list mailing list
> gnome-list gnome org
> http://mail.gnome.org/mailman/listinfo/gnome-list
> 

I see a lot of people complain about the performance of Gnome (and KDE)
versus Windows.  I'm starting to think that they must have their machines
completely hosed.  I run gnome and KDE on a Mobile Pentium 266 mhz laptop
with 96MB ram.  Both perform perfectly adequately, and galeon and konqueror
are both faster than IE used to be (no more dual-booting!).  Mozilla itself
takes about 17 seconds to load, but once it's up, I don't notice excessive
swapping, and things remain tolerably responsive (until I try to open Star
Office, too ;-) ).  I have actually been quite impressed in general with
the speed and efficiency (i.e. non-bloat) of gnome applications.  I have
gnome running on 64MB K6-2 450mhz workstations in our office, and no one
ever complains about speed (not so, the windows users!).

I suggest you check to insure that services you don't need aren't getting
started at boot.  Check for things like database servers (postgresql), nfs
services (portmap, etc.), sendmail, apache, etc..  Chances are, you don't
need these services.  I know red hat turns on everything by default (and
this will slow your machine down) but I can't speak for other distros.  On
low mem machines, I also like to turn off most of the getty processes in
inittab; only a small gain, here, but who needs all those virtual
terminals?  there's also a low-memory how-to somewhere with more tips....

good luck!

Bill