4-core slow due to disk access

[Lucio M Nicolosi]

On Mon, Apr 26, 2010 at 7:57 AM, Joep L. Blom <jlblom at neuroweave.nl> wrote:
> I have in Karmic (2-6.31-20) a nasty problem for which I cannot find a
> solution.
> My system: AMD Phenom II 4 -core 4 GB of memory, 1 HD 250 GB and 2
> external USB disks (resp 250GB and 1 TB), which are irrelevant for the
> problem. I have an 8 GB swap-space.
> After starting the system it's speed is acceptable but not superfast. I
> have e few applications running (terminal, Thunderbird, Firefox and
> gkrellm). I see in gkrellm that I have now 2 GB free and and ~ 1 GB of
> swap-space in use.
> Normally I have vmware running with Windows XP but I have that
> temporarily closed.
> I can see that I use from 1-5 % processortime (over 4 cores), 7 users (I
> have a few terminals started) and 447 processes.
> But when I start a program it takes even > 1q second to start calculator
> and switching folders in Thunderbird, takes sometimes minutes.
> In the gkrellm monitor I see a constant disk use for what?? (I have 2 Gb
> free). I cannot imagine that the system is constantly swapping.
> I have this problem since I started the system (Aug-09) and the slowing
> progresses over time so I need to restart at least every 10 days,
> Has anybody ideas and will it be better with 10.4 LTS?
> Joep

My (legacy) Athon 64 X2 2400 (Karmic/Lucid 64) uses right at this
moment around 700 Mb (of its 4 Gb) for
compiz/firefox/empathy/evolution/skype/synaptic and gkrellm and no
swap at all (346 processes - 1 terminal). Perhaps your 7 open
terminals are responsible for the difference? Perhaps you simply do
not have enough memory to run all these terminals with just 4 Gb ram,
thus the need to swap 2 Gb?

L.

-- 
L M Nicolosi, Eng.
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