[K12OSN] Dell 4600 w/8 Gigs Memory - where is it?

[Alan A Hodson]

Greetings

This may sound strange but in one of the labs we have in El Paso ISD 
(TX) we have a Dell 4600 with 8 Gigs of ram, and yet the system 
monitor tells me that the CPU is working nearly at 100% capacity 
constantly... My question is, how can I configure this monster so 
that the load is shared by the gargantuan amount of memory? It seems 
like if more than 30 users log in, the system starts crawling... I've 
tried the SMP kernel also, and it doesn't seem to help... Somehow I 
am not making proper use of the available memory - any way of 
pre-loading some applications (say openoffice and firefox) so that 
they stay in ram and are available right away for all students?

Any suggestions/clarifications are much appreciated

Alan Hodson
aahodson at episd dot org
http://links.epid.org
-=o=-