Slooow

[yawningdog]

I'm playing chess at instantchess.com and winning decisively when suddenly my machine slows way down. It takes so long to move, I run out of time and lose the match.

I'm using mandrake 8.1, konqueror, and blackdown Java j2re1.3.1. I have a duron 700 and 64mb of pc133.

Any help would be appreciated. I really hate losing.

[Dark Ninja]

With 64MB of RAM (and assuming that you are running KDE or Gnome) it seems as though that would be the reason your machine comes to a grinding slow down. Two things you can do:

1 - Upgrade your RAM. It's cheap as all heck. A 256MB stick of SDRAM is only like $40.00 (if you look around).

2 - Create a swap file if you have not already done so. Kind of like Window's Virtual Memory, but...better. Not as fast as real RAM - but it does help if you don't have a lot of RAM to spare. (And, running a window manager, you probably don't have that much room to spare.)


Dark Ninja

[yawningdog]

Thank you, your reply has echoed what I suspected in the first place, but precipitated another question. I could swear I remember reading that linux created a swap file (partition) when loaded. Is this not true? How do I check?

[demian]

Originally posted by yawningdog:
<STRONG>How do I check?</STRONG>
Type free in a terminal. If you get output like this

total used free shared buffers cached
Mem: 257492 236476 21016 92080 20332 112764
-/+ buffers/cache: 103380 154112
Swap: 273024 436 272588
(it's properly formatted, though :p )

then you _have_ swap space. If the line starting with Swap: is missing then you don't which is a [b]very bad thing[b] (really, really bad). In the latter case post back and we will get you some swap space.