Prelink eating all my resources

Robert Locke lists at ralii.com
Mon Aug 1 16:47:34 UTC 2005


On Mon, 2005-08-01 at 02:30 -0400, Peter Teuben 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 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.

Careful, not e2label....  To re-create the label on the swap device it
appears that we have to actually recreate it with "mkswap -L
labelname /dev/partitionname"


But, I suspect you might be right about an anaconda anomaly.....

--Rob




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