HD spinning is making the computer freeze

[Russell Coker]

On Tue, 3 Feb 2004 00:46, Jean-Rene Cormier <jean-rene.cormier at cipanb.ca> 
wrote:
> Hi, I was doing some graphic editing yesterday with The Gimp and from
> time to time the HD would start spinning and the computer would freeze
> for like 4-5 minutes, I can't do anything during that time, the cursor
> doesn't even move, all that's happening is the HD spinning. Last night I
> checked how long it took to come back and it took over 10 minutes, the
> clock was stuck at 11:51 and when it stopped spinning the clock changed
> to 12:03.
>
> What could be causing this? I'm thinking that it's because I don't have
> much RAM and it has to use the swap file a lot.

Yes, it could be "thrashing" because of lack of RAM.  Even another 128M should 
make it a lot faster.

> Also I noticed that X use an aweful lot of RAM, is this normal? I'm
> running KDE btw.
>
>   PID USER     PRI  NI  SIZE  RSS SHARE STAT %CPU %MEM   TIME CPU
> COMMAND
>  3750 root      15   0  413M 131M 67704 S     0.5 54.9   5:48   0 X

Applications can do things that make the X server take a lot of RAM.  KDE 
programs that display large (resolution 10,000x10,000 or more) PNG or JPG 
files do this.  If the size of your X server is larger than physical RAM then 
performance will suck.  Get 512M of RAM and things should be fine.

Also fedora-list is the correct place for such questions.

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