Slow system

[Carla & Dick Bickert]

Rick Stevens wrote:

> 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.
> ----------------------------------------------------------------------
> - 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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I installed RD9 on a computer with 512MB of  RAM.  It runs much faster 
and not so much disk activity.  Thanks for everyones insight, it helped 
tremendously. 

Dick