hard disk hard work

[miguel]

My question is about the slowness of linux when using kde. I started with a suse 7.0 on a PIII 450 with 128 megs and sometimes I suddenly got slowed down for no reason, the hard disk light turned on for minutes and everything worked at a very slow rate,the mouse got sluggish, apps take even a whole minute just to open and the system seems to be very busy on nothing I started. Yesterday I put a new mandrake 8.0 demo on a P166 witn 64megs and after installation (which was 100% perfect) kde and things at the start worked fine, but again after 40 minutes the hd light turned on continously and the same happened as on the other computer for 30 minutes. I did not dare reset or ctr+alt+del but waited patiently. Today the same thing.
Question is:
-what is going on.
-if it is doing something important,why doesnt it tell me or wait when I´m not working.
-how can I speed up the window manager or give priority to my work.
-Do I have to live through this or can I have control over it.
-both computers have dual boot w98 and linux and if not for this I think linux (on a graphical use) would be top, but somehow I must get something wrong because I dont see many complaints about this slowness.
:( mteijeiroc@nexo.es

[Wheaty]

That 'thrashing' is probably due to Linux running out of RAM to use, and therefore using your swap partition. Mandrake is a pretty bloated distrobution, you could try installing Slack or Debian, which use less RAM (Slack only uses 30MB of RAM when I startx).

[bdl]

This is a standard newbie question, and the answer lies in a couple of different points:

1) Linux utilizes memory differently than windows, and normally takes up all of the free RAM you have on your system in order to achieve greater performance. If you have 128MB RAM and you run the system, add X on top of that, then KDE and any apps you might be running, that's going to more than likely take up the entire 128MB and probably some swap space as well. There comes a certain point when the swap space on your hdd is accessed to 'swap out' pages with RAM. You end up with alot of drive activity, especially if you have a small swap partition and if it's on the same hdd as the rest of your linux install.*

There are a couple of things you might think about, like getting more RAM, or placing a large enough swap partition on a second master hdd that will give you more disk throughput, etc. There is also a project called swapd that gives you a swapfile rather than using a swap partition, some LNO users seem to be keen on it, I havent used it myself.

2) KDE is a memory hog, always has been. Either get used to it, change your system as mentioned above or use something else. I prefer Blackbox myself, very lightweight and configurable. KDE is too sugar sweet for my tastes anyway.


* This is a very glib statement, but serves it's purpose; I'm sure others can give you complete technical background on what the kernel does when it swaps out pages.