Slow system

[Rick Stevens]

Carla & Dick Bickert wrote:
> Bob McClure Jr wrote:
> 
>> On Fri, Dec 17, 2004 at 01:51:09PM -0600, Carla & Dick Bickert wrote:
>>  
>>
>>> I have recently installed Red Hat Linux 9.  It boots fine and there 
>>> appear to be no problems, but the GUI runs EXTREMELY slow (openoffice 
>>> takes 3-4 minutes to come up).  The computer has a Celeron processor 
>>> running at 667 Mhz and the hard drive is plenty big.  Any suggestions?
>>>
>>> Thanks
>>> Dick
>>>   
>>
>>
>> Post the results of running "free".  That may well tell the story.
>>
>> Cheers,
>>  
>>
> 
> 
> The results of  "free" are as follows:
> 
>                 Total        Used       Free      Shared     Buffer     
> Cached
> mem           60348    59456     892          0             1396       
> 14160
> -/+ buffers/cache:      43900     16448 
> Swap:        192772    40432    152340     0
> 
> I'm new at Linux, so keep your answers at an elementary level (if possibe).

You appear to only have 64MB of RAM in your system.  This isn't really
enough to run a desktop environment (you'd even be hard pressed to run
Windows efficiently in 64MB).

You're using 40MB of swap, so your machine is spending a lot of time
swapping.  You've probably also noticed your hard drive is
working pretty hard, too.  When memory gets full, the system starts
looking for programs that aren't currently ready to run.  It then
swaps bits of those programs out to the swap partition of your hard
drive to free up memory, and swaps in pieces of programs from the disk
that are ready to run.  Disk I/O is always much less efficient than
RAM operations, hence your machine slows down.  If the swapping is
bad enough, the machine becomes unusable.

The easiest fix is to add more RAM.  I'd add at least another 64MB,
although you'd be much happier with another 128MB or more.
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- Rick Stevens, Senior Systems Engineer     rstevens at vitalstream.com -
- VitalStream, Inc.                       http://www.vitalstream.com -
-                                                                    -
-     Make it idiot proof and someone will make a better idiot.      -
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