Prelink eating all my resources

[akonstam at trinity.edu]

On Fri, Jul 29, 2005 at 03:17:44AM -0400, Peter Teuben wrote:
> 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.
Running any Unix without a swap partition is not recommend although
you have found that that works after a fashion. You have just proved
to yourself that the swap partition is not really the virtual memory
repository that people think it is but it is useful to move aside
chunks of disk space that are not currently being actively used.-- 

=======================================================================
I didn't do it! Nobody saw me do it! Can't prove anything!
                -- Bart Simpson
-------------------------------------------
Aaron Konstam
Computer Science
Trinity University
telephone: (210)-999-7484