Gutsy speed

[Aart Koelewijn]

Op di, 11-12-2007 te 13:41 -0400, schreef Derek Broughton:
> Tony Arnold wrote:
> 
> > Derek Broughton wrote:
> >> 
> >> It's an Intel Celeron M 520, running at 1.6GHz, a SATA disk (no idea of
> >> specs - LVM and 4 JFS filesystems), and 1GB real memory and 3GB swap. 
> >> It's
> >> always running a lot of cruft :-)  Currently running an Apache server, a
> >> Plone server, a PostGreSQL database, an NX server, two Konquerors with
> >> about a dozen tabs open, an IMAP server, two X sessions, and a partridge
> >> in a pear tree.
> > 
> > Well, I'd get rid of the partridge:-)
> 
> Oh, I thought everybody had one at this time of year :-)
>  
> > Seriously, an obvious thing to try is to shut down as much stuff as you
> > can and then see if FF is any quicker. This may or may not be practical!
> 
> Not really. fwiw I checked memory:
> 
> Mem:   1025972k total,   933660k used,    92312k free,        0k buffers
> Swap:  3004112k total,   358188k used,  2645924k free,   385268k cached
> 
> which seems entirely reasonable.
> 
> I never much cared until you started asking...  So I went into Firefox and
> turned off Java, reloading tabs at startup, and checking for updates to
> Add-ons and search engines.  It restarted in about 5 seconds.  I went back
> and turned those back on one at a time - and it _still_ starts in 5
> seconds.  So I don't really know what I've changed...  Damn.
> 

On my server/desktop I also often have huge memory consuming
applications running for weeks. After a number of weeks the desktop
becomes very slow and I notice a lot of swap activity. Shutting down and
restarting of the memory consuming applications will bring it up to
speed again (not fast anyway because it is only 450 Mhz). After shutting
down and restarting of those applications the use of swap is a lot lower
(less then ~ 30%)

I suppose some of those applications may have memory leaks or f.i.
Firefox may cache all the pages you have viewed for several days/weeks.

I can live with restarting some applications once a week.

Aart