Prelink eating all my resources
Peter Teuben
teuben at astro.umd.edu
Mon Aug 1 06:30:09 UTC 2005
> Hi list,
> Once again my FC4 box (Duron 1200mHz, 512 ram) has crawled to a halt.
> I quickly top'ed and found a process prelink that varied between
> 74%-98% CPU usage.
>
> PID USER PR NI VIRT RES SHR S %CPU %MEM TIME+ COMMAND
> 5202 root 39 19 11724 9280 536 R 89.9 1.9 0:23.59 prelink
>
> So I googled for prelink and now know that it helps preload libraries
> so that progreams can start faster. Which is senseable because the
> machine started slowing down when I clicked 'manage bookmarks' in
> firefox, which opens another program. My question is, what can I do to
> prevent this from happening again? Do I have to ust cross my fingers
> every time I open a new program?
>
> Could this be related to the fact that I have no swap partition? I
> know that I should probably add one, I guess that I've just been too
> lazy to learn how. Will adding a swap partition make the machine less
> sluggish? For this 512 ram machine, I was thinking of adding a 2 gig
> swap partition.
I had reported on a similar problem, and finally paid attention to the
output of "df" which showed 0 usage of swap. In fact, total was 0 too,
i.e. i had no swap despite that it was installed with swap. Turned
out the /etc/fstab file had a rather curious line in it:
LABEL= swap swap defaults 0 0
where the = sign was followed by 15 0xAA characters (that dind't print
in the cut&paste above)!! So, no wonder. I suspect it is something in
the installed that is broken, since i install redhat systems fairly
regularly, or i overlooked a new(?) requirement that partitions be
labeled.
Anyways, after hardcoding
/dev/hda5 swap swap defaults 0 0
and running 'swapon' i'm back in business. e2label and making a nice label
of course also would do the job.
I only have 640MB on this laptop, so i guess a swap is pretty important,
although you don't often run into this problem and it can take weeks before
you figured it out.
peter
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