Prelink eating all my resources

[Peter Teuben]

On Fri, 29 Jul 2005, Dotan Cohen wrote:

> 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've also notices that on occasion i have a similar (but not prelink)
"problem": the machine is crawling to a halt, the load can go up
like crazy (10 or 20) briefly and return to normal after a while. I am
doing things that take resources, e.g. once i was loading big (1kx2k)
images using xv, and another time compiling a large project. To me
it seemed as if it was not able to figure out how to efficiently manage
the swap. Overal, i'm not impressed with my new FC4system (which
ran RH9 quite allright before).

peter